Bottled Goods Read online

  “Comrade, please join me at headquarters.”

  This sentence would be the end of her fantasy of bravery, where she plays an unknown heroine of the Resistance. In the moldy cellars of the Secret Services, she would finally deliver her pupil, between gasps and stutters, and maybe other blunt or shrill sounds she is too afraid to think of.

  In her home, she can lull the Secret Service man with the warm colors in her apartment, cake, coffee, and smiles unreflected in her mismatched eyes. Mondays, she always bakes, so that the man may sit in his favorite armchair, his cigarette in one hand, the cake in the other, stretching his legs. Today, his socks are emerald green. Alina finds it easier to look at them than in his eyes, as blue as the blade of a knife, while waiting for the cut.

  “Comrade, let’s talk a little, eh?”

  Alina nods, tracing the ash the man is littering on her handwoven carpet.

  “Comrade Mungiu, on October 15th, pupil Atanasiu brought contraband items to school. I was given to understand that you facilitated the escape of the said pupil. Is that true?”

  “No. My grandmother had a carpet, a piece of tapestry on the wall, did you know that? An antiquity from France, from the times before we had been enlightened by communism.”

  In this country, turning a blind eye is an art, a skill you must learn at a young age. Or else, the path of the snitch unravels. But he is relentless.

  “Then why is the daughter of comrade Săpunaru saying that you witnessed the whole incident?”

  “Ah, children fight all the time, you know? Usually, I don’t pay attention. The carpet. The colors were faded, but you could still see that it was a hunt scene. In a clearing in the woods, a conglomerate of hounds, riders, beaters, all chasing a terrified deer.”

  Every time the Secret Service man comes, she waits for the sword above her head to fall and cut deep, but this is not his weapon of choice. He squeezes the air out of her lungs little by little, tightening her chest with menaces.

  “Comrade, do you know what happens to dissidents? To their accomplices? Can you tell me, comrade?” And then, in a whisper, “You don’t know, do you? Your husband—he did not tell you much, did he?”

  No, Liviu didn’t tell her what happened in the cellars of the Secret Services. After three days at the “headquarters,” he came home smelling of piss and blood. He closed the bathroom door and let the water run for more than two hours. When he came out, he went straight to bed. Later that night, in a whim of moonlight, she saw that he had many small, round burns on the soles of his feet.

  The man raises his voice while his eyes search the narrow space between her breasts, the portion of thigh he can now see. Her skirt slipped upward while she was fidgeting.

  “You never wondered why he didn’t tell you anything?”

  “The thing always seemed a bit blown out of proportion.” Her voice now quivers like her own pupils’ do when reciting a poem they didn’t quite learn by heart. “The hunt, I mean. All those hunters for just one deer. My grandmother had a name for that carpet. La chasse? No, that’s not it. I can’t—”

  “Comrade, you are being uncooperative. You are misleading me on purpose. I asked a simple question.”

  “No, no, I didn’t see anything! Why don’t you believe me?”

  She’s shrill and teary eyed. He grabs her trembling hand.

  “I want you to think carefully until next week. Maybe you’ll remember something.”

  Letting her go, he rises to leave, but their fingers touch when she hands him his coat and his nose brushes her hair when he leans to take his hat. Their shoulders graze as he makes his way to the door. Alina knows that if she screams, nobody will hear her.

  “It’s battue,” he says without turning.

  “Excuse me?”

  They’re standing in the narrow hallway and his manly odors make something within her constrict.

  “That word you were seeking. It’s battue.”

  “Of course. Battue. Beaten.”

  The Pinch

  Sometimes, Liviu pinches her buttocks when she stoops to gather the empty plates. He grabs her flesh between his fingers, twists, and pulls. He says he means it as a joke, but the clenching of his jaws says the opposite.

  Tonight, he catches her by surprise, and she drops a plate to the floor. While she is sweeping the shards, he says, “Be careful next time! We don’t have enough money to replace everything you break.”

  The plate belongs to a set of six they received as a wedding gift from Aunt Theresa. The plate is now a metaphor for something—Alina can find plenty of examples in her life to compare it to.

  Disenchantment

  I choose to visit Aunt Theresa on a Monday—I know who I will find there. But I’m late. As I come in, the two nuns are leaving. They’re both tall and probably lean. I can’t tell because of their ample black robes. They have wrinkled, pale faces and hands with long, thin fingers. Their skin has a translucence that captures light like an aura, probably from all the praying. The nuns come to town every Monday to buy flour and oil and whatever they can’t craft or grow themselves. They always come by my aunt Theresa’s and she slips them a few bars of Fa soap or a bag of Tide detergent. When I was a schoolgirl, I read that in the Middle Ages the rich bought the absolution of their sins with gold. I wonder if this is what she is doing—buying herself clemency for what she does every third Wednesday of each month.

  Aunt Theresa squeezes their hands, as if she’s kneading their essence between her own bony fingers. The nuns leave behind an aroma of frankincense, wax, and cleanliness. I want to run after them, bury my head in their chests, allow them to soothe me. Instead, I take off my boots. By the time I enter the living room, my heart is thumping again.

  “Alina? Are you feeling all right?” asks my aunt.

  I collapse in an armchair, stare at my own knees. I feel the sturdy frame of my aunt settling on the armrest. I take her hand, the one that had touched the nuns, hoping that something good will rub off it.

  “I barely sleep at night,” I say. “I barely eat. In fact, I barely do anything besides obsessing whether they’ll arrest me or not.”

  “Arrest you? Who would arrest you?” she says, drawing her hand away.

  I bury my face in my palms and tell her everything in a single breath: about the children, the magazine, the man with a scar above his left eye. I tell her about his hungry looks, the way he repeats the same questions, the unspoken threat of the “headquarters.” I tell her things that I do not dare tell my husband. I only look at her when I am done. She shakes her head, but her bracelets are silent.

  “This is disgusting,” she says. “All of this—just because children were being children.”

  She opens a window, wrenches a cigarette free from its package. She strikes the lighter three times before she manages to conjure a flame.

  “Sometimes I think there is something deeply wrong with this country.”

  “Can you help me?” I ask.

  “Help you? Of course I can. I suspect someone has done charms on you. Could you come next Wednesday? I’m expecting two gypsy witches and a fortune teller. Sure. We’ll see what we can do for you.”

  When I was eleven years old, a witch woman stopped me on the street and asked me for a banknote. Startled, I gave her the five-lé* bill I was meant to buy bread with. She folded it, made a few quick movements with her hands, and puff! The bill was gone. Then she said that if I screamed, if I asked the other people on the street for help, the devil would come and steal me. I returned home crying, with no bread. When I told my mother, she took out my father’s leather belt. I remember that my bottom still burned at dinner. Much later, in high school, when all my friends went to have their futures told, I refused to join them.

  “I don’t want to have anything to do with witches. How about cousin Matei? He works for the Secret Services, doesn’t he?”

  She snorts smoke out of her nostrils—the extinguished fire of a dragon.

  “That’s precisely why he can’
t do anything for you. What credibility would he have afterward?”

  I grind my teeth. “Really, you too?”

  “My dear, it’s bad enough for us that your brother-in-law is a defector. Matei can’t intercede on your behalf. But I could say an incantation against the evil eye.”

  By the time she returns with a bowl of water and a matchbox, I’m already in the hallway, putting on my boots. She lifts her fingers to make the sign of the cross, but I turn my back and slam the door. On the way home, all I can think about is calling my mother. When we’re scared, we all cry for our mothers.

  Slip

  Liviu’s chomping and crunching drives Alina away from the table, making her throw her half-full plate in the sink. It clashes with a hollow sound. She turns up the water and begins to wash the dishes, to cover his noises. He doesn’t even lift his head.

  Last year, they needed two tables to accommodate their eleven guests: their own, and a borrowed one from the neighbors. The tables sagged with the weight of the food: Russian and Asian salads, smoked sausages and pastramis, homemade noodle soup, roast beef and stuffed pork.

  Today, only a few distant friends, who hadn’t heard about her brother-in-law’s defection, called to overflow her with dry congratulations. Not even her mother is there—she’s in Eforie, for a health cure.

  Alina wants them to flee for the evening, to a restaurant, but when Liviu returns from work, it’s already too late and he is tired. He doesn’t even notice her elegant dark-blue dress, her new earrings, or her red lipstick, clotted on her lips from waiting. There is nothing left for her other than to conjure a quick meal out of the leftovers of yesterday’s pork steak.

  Alina wishes for nothing more than to be able to run from themselves for one day, from this evening like any other, this air between them as they sit face-to-face at the living room table, thick with the alcohol vapors Liviu exhales. Everybody drinks on the commute, and Liviu has plenty of time to do so, to “fraternize” with the other workers on the train. What faster road to friendship is there than the one slippery with cheap vodka? It is the end of the world where he is going, and when he returns, he is always tired, and his weariness makes everything around them wither and wilt.

  Liviu kisses her on the cheek, a wary lover, a less-than-dutiful husband. Once he closes the bedroom door, she cuts herself a lonely slice of birthday cake. It’s strawberries and buttercream, her favorite. She places it on the kitchen table and lights herself a cigarette. Alina is accustomed to this exhaling of smoke in the air filled only with silence, in the quiet breaks in the teacher’s room, in the afternoon hours, which are lately dilating and throwing longer shadows.

  Liviu’s plate lingers on the table, an unwanted presence. Alina puts out her cigarette in the leftover mashed potatoes and takes out the cake from the fridge. She tilts it over the garbage bin, so that it slips soundlessly in.

  Of Gifts of Unknown Provenance

  It looks excitingly modern. Its keys are white, except for the first one in the second row, which is red. I turn the round black handle and the cold plastic sends shivers down my spine and at the same time ignites a warm feeling in the depths of my stomach. Yes. This is how I will roll them out. Then I will pile them up and climb one piece of paper at a time toward my dream.

  In the other corner of the table, my mother is arranging her fur hat, smiling. The self-sufficiency I read on her face reminds me I should take everything that comes from her with a grain of salt. Up until now, dealing with her was like dealing with the devil—the costs always surpassed the benefits, like comparing Everest with a molehill.

  I had buried my dream and mourned it properly a month ago, when Rodica from Bucharest told me over the telephone, in her obnoxiously nasal voice, that she would not be needing me to contribute to the math exercise book anymore. I stared at the handwritten pages of exercises for hours and hours in a row through my clouded eyes, wishing to be able to destroy them. Their sight was a constant reminder of my failures.

  “There,” my mother says. “Now you can write your own exercise book. You don’t need to share that first page with anyone.” She leans toward me, winking. “You know what you could afford from the royalties you would receive from the book? Lawyers.”

  “Why would I want a lawyer?” I quip, pretending not to understand. “Thank you. This is a gift from Heaven.” I stroke my typewriter like a favorite cat.

  My mother fumbles in her purse and draws out a cigarette. She blows the smoke toward Liviu’s jacket, forgotten on one of the dining room chairs.

  “Sweetie. You look more pleased and happy now than you ever have since you married that peasant of yours.”

  The glowing tip of her cigarette draws a circle around my head. I could reply that it’s not my husband’s fault that I’m not happy, but her own refusal to support me, forcing me into taking a job I never liked. My hand on the typewriter feels awfully cold—strange enough, for a gift from hell. Not strange at all, considering the fact that she wields this gift like a dagger, hoping to slash a rift of separation between me and my husband. I could say something about her attempt at manipulation. Instead, I tell her, “I’m delighted by your present!”

  She smiles. “And don’t pretend you don’t understand what I mean about the lawyers.”

  If she only knew how close Liviu and I dance on the verge of divorce, and how he doesn’t need her help to pirouette away from me. How much more smug could that smile of hers be?

  She pats my knee, like one would stroke an obedient dog. “But the two of us, we always understood each other, didn’t we?”

  I glance again at the typewriter, at the metallic glare of the keys, its weight on my table, sealing a pact. And to think that my mother is the one who taught me never to accept gifts of unknown provenance.

  The Skirt

  The year when the Beloved Leader came to our town, my mother didn’t cook us dinner for eleven days in a row. The Beloved Leader had to inaugurate a truck factory, and my mother was tailoring a skirt from dark-red tweed.

  The skirt was meant to be tight at the top and flaring at the bottom, ending at knee level. Something must have gone wrong, because my mother had to undo it after six days and start again. After that, she barely spoke to me. She went around the house with the measuring tape draped around her neck like a necklace, pins stuck in her collar.

  The day after the skirt was done, my teacher came to school wearing it. The folds had a liquid quality about them, shifting with every motion. Two days later, on the day that the nominations for the position of flower bearer were made, my teacher was wearing the skirt again. When the moment came, she called my name and my classmates applauded. It was the greatest honor imaginable: coming close to the Beloved Leader, giving him flowers.

  At home, my mother and I practiced the act of bestowing.

  A week later, a lady with a purple hat came from the Party to inspect all candidates. The nominees were rounded up in the school festivity hall.

  We went up on stage in groups of six, where she would ask us to smile, turn, walk, and pretend that we were giving flowers. When it was my turn to perform, she leaned in closer. She smelled of tobacco, coffee, and a Bulgarian rose perfume my aunt also used to wear. She asked me if my eyes were mismatched. I informed her that I had a gray eye and a brown eye.

  The lady wrinkled her nose. It didn’t occur to me to explain that there were many mismatched things in my life. For instance, my mother’s expectations.

  My mother asked me how it went. When I told her, her lips tightened as if a magic string had been pulled through their flesh and someone was tugging hard at it.

  That spring, the Beloved Leader came, and I was not there to give him flowers.

  For the remainder of the school year, we dined in silence and I didn’t lift my offending eyes from the plate.

  Quotes from My Mother (Commented)—Part II

  “Did you know that Alexandra split up with her . . . friend and is now living with her mother?” Wistful look, puppy eyes.
“She probably will, for the rest of her life. Who would want to marry her now, after such a scandal?”

  Alexandra was my childhood friend, the daughter of our neighbors. Before my own life fell apart, she ran away with a married man and was the talk of the town for two months. But then, the married man did what married men do, which is go home to their wives. Divorce is another word the communist authorities don’t like.

  To my mother, my friend’s broken heart is not the point of the story. Nor does she take a moralistic or religious point of view, on the line of, “She got what she deserved” (to her own credit, like most of her friends do). For her, the point is that Alexandra’s mother will now have a companion slash person to be talked to and talked at, slash to cook, slash to nurse her in the final years of her life. She envies Alexandra’s mother.

  But, on the other hand, my mother is right. If my friend doesn’t move away from here, chances are that she’ll never find another man. It’s a small town. People do little but talk.

  “If anything bad happens between you and your husband, you could come live with me.”

  I cut her short with an “I know, Mom,” dismissing her idea, but the truth is that I’ve actually been thinking about it.

  I can see no point in sharing a bed with Liviu if all I do is turn my back to him, wincing at his smell of alcohol. No point in our dinners together if the silence is broken only by my forced chirps nobody listens to, punctuated by my husband’s complaints. No point in the pecks on the cheek we call “kisses” that we still give to each other because that is expected from a married couple.

  Sundays are the hardest days of the week. I can’t wait for the day to end, to wake up on Monday morning, to put my makeup on and go to school. I can hardly wait for the weight of the day we spent as a couple to lift slowly from my shoulders, like steam rising from cooling water.