Bottled Goods Read online

  I fold the egg into the sour cream, then add hot soup to the mixture, a spoonful at a time, stirring, careful not to make the yolk clot. A tiny mistake, and my work of four hours would be ruined. I hold my breath. Liviu steps to my side, wraps his hand around my waist.

  3. “We’re writing a research paper on Roman influences in architecture in the Carpatho-Danubian space in the third century AD.”

  My hand holding the bowl freezes midair. “You can’t possibly have come up with this just now.”

  He rubs his nose in my ear.

  “Isn’t it just brilliant? Using my history studies, my passion for archaeology, to write a research paper that would show the extent of Roman influences in the space that later became Romania. Or—even better—vice versa. Taking examples of Dacian architecture, how they were implemented in Rome. And you’re helping me with the documentation.”

  He speaks quicker, and louder. He fidgets behind me. His own idea is sweeping him away. I nudge him, careful not to spill the contents of my bowl.

  “But there is none,” I reply. “Dacians built in wood, there might as well be nothing left.”

  He blows in my soup. “You never learn, do you? Historical accuracy is of no consequence to the Government. It says whatever it likes—and it has to be true. It glorifies those who make it add up. By the way, I think your soup is still too hot for eggs.”

  I ponder.

  4. “We’re writing this research paper, and we have to compare Roman architecture across Italy and Germany. This way, we show how Dacian culture was exported to the fringes of the Roman Empire.”

  He chuckles. “Clever, clever. But why?”

  “Don’t you see?” I say. “We have two attempts at obtaining a visa this way. Doubles our chances.”

  He holds me tight, burrows his nose in my hair. “Rosewater,” he says. “You smell of rosewater. And your plan is magnificent.”

  I drop the contents of the bowl into the cooking pot, stirring. Underneath, the yellowish mass of soup becomes white and silky. There aren’t any clots.

  I say, “It’s perfect.”

  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

  What We Had to Give To Whom

  Liviu’s share of his mother’s plum orchard To a neighbor who produces impressive quantities of schnapps every year, using the said plums and a distiller he usually hides in a cheese barrel

  The gold earrings that belonged to my grandmother To Aunt Theresa, who gave me ten times their value for them

  Liviu’s collection of rare stamps To an eleven-year-old whose mother is one of the Chief Secretaries of the Party

  The manuscript for the math exercise book To Rodica from Bucharest after bargaining worse than two fishwives on a market day

  Our wedding rings To a tractor driver from Seceratu

  Like Music

  There’s something in the way we swirl around each other late in the evening, whispering in each other’s ears, gathering the remnants of our feast. There’s something in the way we smile and hold hands, turn the TV, radio, up loud, leave the water running, confounding the men who tapped into our lives, so we can speak and make plans about our brightening future. There’s something in the way hope creeps up behind our backs and presses its palms against our eyes, leaving us smiling, but blind to the future. And we are both reluctant to speak its name, for fear that it might vanish. There’s something in the way we hold each other at night, like shipwrecked passengers, like that summer when the sea was licking at our toes, like the first time we met. There’s something in the way we say, We will, We will, We will, ringing in our ears like music.

  Paparudă

  It’s the week after Easter, and I’m in a car. You’d think Liviu and I would be gliding toward the border—West Germany approved our visa last week—but instead, he decided to wait for the Italian one, too. So, I’m in Aunt Theresa’s car again, meandering on a country path that defies the logic that roads should take the shortest course between two points.

  Today, Aunt Theresa called and asked for my help. “There’s a drought,” she told me. We needed her help, too, so I couldn’t deny her a favor. Here I am in her Volga, listening to her telling me how this is the old wagon road that once delineated the border between the peasants’ lands and the estate of the boieri*—our ancestors.

  “When the company came to build the road in the 1930s,” she says, “they offered sums for the patches of land they needed for the road that made your head spin, and yet your grandfather refused to sell. Back then, he said he had a moral duty to his forefathers to pass on the estate untouched. If only he knew!”

  When the communists came to power, they took everything from him and would have claimed his life too, if my grandmother hadn’t shrunk him. This was years before I was born. I grew up in the reassuringly sterile concrete environment of a newly built ten-story apartment building. The musty smell of wet earth, the spikes of wheat in my palms, the leathery faces of peasants say nothing to me, unlike Aunt Theresa, whom the villagers always call in their hour of need.

  I have my needs too: the need to tell her about the visa, the need for sound advice. But breaking this silence would be like crushing a crystal glass under my foot. Aunt Theresa steers into the village, while dirty, barefooted children wave at her. She drives on, to the old house, the boieri’s mansion. In front of it, dozens of men and women in traditional costumes, dark wool skirts and trousers, and ii—white shirts embroidered in blue—are waiting for us. The women hold crowns and garlands made of woven leaves and branches decorated with red ribbons. An old woman with a dark head-kerchief, wrinkled as time itself, steps up to Aunt Theresa and kisses her on the cheek. Aunt Theresa grabs her hand, squeezes it hard. She then turns to me.

  “Alina, take off your clothes.”

  * * *

  You’d think that the rain has come, a fearful storm, if you listened to the claps of the hands, the snap of fingers, the wooden spoons drumming into cauldrons, but the dust, this dry dust rises to my thighs, barely licking my belly, an indecent lover aroused by the fact that the entire village is watching us, singing:

  Paparudă, rudă,

  vino de ne udă—*

  And they sing faster, faster, faster, and my feet are spinning, and I have no power over them as I leap and jump, making the dust rise higher and higher, caressing my breasts, and two old women pour buckets of water over us, making my dust hiss and rise one more time, caressing me, becoming one with me as its breath dies, and Aunt Theresa is right behind me, jingling jade beads and chanting an incantation, words I can’t make out, in a low voice, like a rumble of thunder, and the song of the villagers goes on, even as we pass the church and the men and women cross themselves, but I can’t, because my hands move to the music, the makeshift sounds of rain, and so do my bare feet, waking the dust, helping it insinuate under my skirt made of leaves and weeds, I have nothing under it, nothing on my torso except for a garland of leaves on my breasts which the men watch as they bob and dangle with my jumps, my nipples hardening because of the cold water being poured on me, or maybe it’s the touch of dust. Oh, let me taste you, roll in you, in our embrace, before the rain comes and extinguishes you.

  * * *

  On our way back, in the car, I catch my breath. My cheeks burn with the shame of having been seen naked by the entire village. I sniff. In this blinding afternoon light, the darkest thoughts are flooding my mind: I paraded naked in front of dozens of people—the shame! We’ll be trapped in Romania forever. We’ll wait for the Italian visa until the German one expires.

  I’d love to speak to Aunt Theresa, but I’m too angry because of what she made me do.

  She places a hand over mine and says, “You’ve done well, you’ve helped a lot.”

  “Bullshit.”

  She turns to me, startled, and shakes her head. “You don’t even know how much good you’ve done. But make sure you lie
with your husband tonight. Or else, you’re marked.”

  “Marked for what?” I say.

  “The Paparudă is an ancient ritual, meant to bring the rain,” she says. “It’s a fertility ritual. Lie with your husband.”

  I wrench my hand away.

  At home, I crash onto my bed, fall into a deep sleep. In my dream, the dust arranges itself in Victor’s face, and his fingers are grabbing me, tearing, pinching, caressing, and the villagers drum their song of rain. I open my eyes. It’s the middle of the night, and Liviu is fast asleep beside me. A drumming on glass summons me to the window. I walk toward it, still pregnant with sleep, and peer outside. It’s raining.

  Typewriter Money

  “What in the name of God have you been telling your mother?” asks Aunt Theresa when she opens the door.

  I dance over the threshold, pivot around her to the hallway, take off my shoes. The cold tiles soothe my dilated feet.

  “Outside, the air burns your lungs if you try to breathe in,” I say. “She called you, I assume?”

  Aunt Theresa smirks. “She asked me to stop telling you nonsense. Garbage. Would you like some tea? Coffee?”

  “Water from the fridge.”

  I plunked two cubes of sugar in my coffee and watched them sink and dissolve.

  “Why do you want to know about my cousins?” asked my mother. “I haven’t had any contact with them since before you were born.”

  “Aunt Theresa said that they fled to France first, but then settled somewhere in Germany. That they had been granted political asylum.”

  “What is with all these questions? Has Aunt Theresa contacted them? If that is the case, it is our duty to report her.”

  “Of course,” I said, sipping my coffee. It scalded, conjuring tiny blisters on my tongue. I brushed the newly sprouted bumps against my lips. “I was just wondering.”

  “Do you want more trouble with the Secret Services than you already have?” she asked. She leaned toward me, whispered in my ear. “This could endanger your book, do you realize? Especially now that it’s going so well! Do you have any news?”

  In the living room: a green cylinder with a zipper, made of impermeable cloth, almost as tall as me. I shriek.

  “You did it, didn’t you? How did you manage? Was it witchcraft again?” I tease.

  “Ha!” she chuckles. “Not this time. I asked one of the managers of the universal store to call around. They found one in Sibiu. They shipped it with an ambulance.”

  I finger the zipper, feeling the cloth my new tent is made of.

  “An ambulance? Why an ambulance?”

  Aunt Theresa waves, clinking her bracelets. “Don’t ask.”

  “Is it normal that I’m still horrified about how things can be arranged in this country?”

  “It should please you,” she says. “This is the place where everything is possible.”

  “Or impossible,” I correct her. “It depends on if you’re on the good side of the authorities or not.”

  “Yup,” I said, stirring in my cup. “The inspector sent the manuscript to Bucharest for reviewing. He told me not to tell anyone, but it looks good.”

  My mother smirked, patted my leg.

  “There you go!” She brushed her hand through my hair. “I’m so proud of you!”

  I wanted to tell her about the inspector. I swear. But then I had to ask about my cousins and it would have been too much, all of a sudden. It’s been more than a month since my appointment, since it turned out my manuscript is worth no more than the paper it is written on. Perhaps good enough to start a fire.

  But the last time the two of us met I was too tired—I had to rehearse with the children for the winter festivities, and one of the girls kept forgetting her lines, so we had to start from the beginning over and over again. And the time before that my mother was upset because she couldn’t find a full gas cylinder in the whole town. So there seemed to be no breaking of this circle of lies, and I was compelled to ask, “Is it true that you had a governess? That you wrote poems in French when you were a teenager? That you had a piano, and not the upright kind, in your house?”

  Batting my eyelashes, tilting my head, avoiding the blow long before my mother thought of administering it.

  “Really, Alina. Can’t we converse on other subjects? You know that I don’t like to talk about my family.”

  “The typewriter is so nice,” I said. “It’s a pity not to use it. I was thinking about writing about our family history.”

  “I don’t think that our family history agrees with the principles of Socialism, though.”

  The old cliché “attack is the best defense” seems to be true. I don’t want her to ask about the typewriter and she doesn’t.

  “The cousin of one of our coworkers has lent us a guide to all the camping places in Austria. I don’t have anything for Germany, though,” I say.

  “Don’t worry. You’ll find something once you’re there. You can look for your uncles in Nuremberg. And you can always sleep in the car.”

  I caress the coarse sackcloth.

  “I can’t believe this. I can’t believe we’re so close to doing this.” I get up, extracting an envelope from my white purse. “Tell me how much the tent costs.”

  “Don’t worry, you can pay me later. Besides, it’s Monday. Do you want to be giving money the whole week?”

  I clack my tongue.

  “Oh, please. I really want to do this,” I say. “I have the typewriter money.”

  Aunt Theresa cocks an eyebrow.

  “I finally found a buyer.”

  One of these days, I’ll tell my mother everything. About the inspector, the typewriter, our plans to escape. I will. I just have to find the perfect moment. And when I do, I will confess it all. She is bound to do what all mothers do: be happy if I am happy, even if this entails staying with Liviu, turning our backs on our country. This is what mothers do.

  Aunt Theresa throws me a long glance before she closes the door.

  “Be careful with your mother,” she says. Sometimes I think that she can read my thoughts, but only when I don’t want her to. “You never know what to expect from her. I certainly hope she doesn’t suspect anything.”

  Cutting Short

  Today, even the wind thwarts me. It’s so hard to keep the flame burning on my father’s grave. I try to shelter the slender wax candle in a tin box that once served as a container for powdered milk. I snap a flame into life and bend the lighter toward the already scorched string of the candle. The wind swells again, makes the fire pinch my fingers. I drop the lighter, curse through my teeth before I realize what I’ve done and apologize to God. Everything is harder than it should be these days.

  Everything. Even talking to my mother. I have to avoid her, cutting our telephone conversations short. Or else she’d want to know the cause of this mixture of exhilaration and angst that clings to me like a thistle in wool, conjured by the fully packed suitcases under our bed. This thrill that translates into wide smiles, a spring in my step, a certain crazed light in my eye, which the Secret Service man doesn’t know what to make of. Every Tuesday, the space between us seems to diminish, like two celestial orbs on tangential orbits, moving slowly toward collision. In the evening, I beg Liviu: We should jump into our car, drive away. “Soon, soon,” he says. “Soon.”

  I find myself murmuring soon, soon at my father’s grave. I tell him I am sorry, and I recite a prayer for his soul. I don’t know many—just bits and pieces I’ve learned from Aunt Theresa. My mother has always been an overzealous communist, shunning all forms of religion.

  “Not how we were raised,” Aunt Theresa used to say.

  “Hard to tell,” I replied.

  My mother doesn’t talk about her childhood. She’s ashamed that her parents had been wealthy landowners. My mother appears to be the most convinced communist you’ve ever known.

  I don’t know any more prayers, so I begin talking to my father. Aren’t the dead the best listeners? Don’t they
have the sharpest ears? “Liviu and I are packing. We’ll go. Don’t be upset with me when I stop turning up at your grave, it’s just that I went in search of a better life. You’d have been happy for me.”

  My father was incapable of being upset with me, but he thought his inability to punish and admonish made him a poor parent. He was in awe of my mother’s strictness. And yet, when he drove me to school, he dropped me a few lei for an extra pretzel or a coveted cheese pie. One day, when my mother was away for a congress, he drove me to Bucharest, to the zoo. I ask him, “Do you remember? I never told anyone about that. Not my mother, anyway. I’m afraid of her. I tried to tell her, God knows I did, but every time I open my mouth, I panic. She’s so terrified of being left alone, that I don’t know what she might do. You’ll say, she always wants the best for me, but I begin to wonder. Help me, Dad. I don’t know how much longer I can lie to her.” I cross myself and realize that I began praying to him as if I was praying to one of the saints. Still, I go on. “Help me. Should I tell her or not? Could I live with myself if I go, never saying goodbye? After all she’s done for me. Help me, Dad. Help me.”

  “I thought I might find you here.”

  My mouth snaps open and shut at the sound of my mother’s voice. I turn. She stands as upright as the candle I just lit for my father, her patterned silk shirt flapping in the wind. She holds a bouquet of wildflowers.

  “Mother,” I say, and move to kiss her on the cheek. I wonder, How much has she heard? “Of course I’m here. It’s the anniversary of Dad’s death.”

  “And, obviously, I wasn’t invited.” She drops the wildflowers in front of my father’s marble cross, then extracts cigarettes from her purse. She sits, legs crossed, on the neighboring grave, fenced by a mantel of polished white stone.

  “Somebody is buried there,” I say.