Issue 152 Is Online!

search index
of all issues

Search This Site Enter word(s) to search for:

Little boys selling raspberries in slender paper packets surrounded Lucian on the wooden platform. He watched the dark blue train climbing mountain meadows past cabins with fertility emblems over their doors. To the boys he was a tall, funny old man with hair as thick as a sheep's fleece. He had hemmed the cuffs and pockets of his orange shirt with white thread. Last year, brooding that he had never seen the sea, he had realized that fishermen were no less manly because they did their own sewing. He decided to darn his socks and shirts himself rather than sending them to a widow. A widow who sewed for him might make other claims, and that would upset his children.

He had remained faithful to Alina throughout their marriage. It was a source of comfort to him now, but it had been a torment at the time. Satan had tortured him with the thick hair, long tight thighs and taut breasts of women who knelt next to the tall, athletic veterinarian while he examined their livestock. It was a gift from God that he had only once caressed another woman's breasts.

Lucian climbed into the train and found his compartment. In the sloping fields men and women stooked hay into tall, gleaming cones. He had been a child when the farthest peaks on the opposite side of the valley had become Romanian after the First World War, and a defeated soldier when the peaks had been lost to the Soviet Union. By the time the creation of an independent Ukraine had made it possible once again to travel to the mountain village over the border where his mother had been born, he was an old man. Doubting he could endure the long journey to his mother's village, he had decided on a different destination for his trip.

The journey to Stalingrad had begun on a train. He could barely remember the night before their departure, when they had visited the prostitutes. The memory that persisted was of his unbalanced feeling the next morning as they tramped into the troop wagon. His shoulders felt aslant beneath the weight of his pack. As a boy in his village Lucian had made love with a girl next to a river at night. He loved this girl's smile, the sweep of her thick dark hair as cool as mist on his stomach; in the chill of the troop wagon the memory of her made him want to moan.

The prostitutes waited for the soldiers in narrow wooden beds permeated with the smell of candle wax and sweat. His comrades' groaning broke through the blankets slung over lengths of hemp to separate the beds. He had not known that the act of love could be emptied of love, the body moving forward without the spirit. When their officers spoke of the need to defeat Oriental Bolshevism Lucian imagined Bolsheviks as bodies without spirits, men whose flesh was pinched in an embrace devoid of love.

On the Eastern Front they rounded up men in the woods and marched across abandoned furrows that reached to the horizon. The villages they entered were inhabited by women and children. The officers ordered the younger women to sleep with them; enlisted men foraged among the leftovers. The women bowed their heads when chosen by a soldier. Knowing their husbands were unlikely to return, they proved more welcoming in bed. Only the Romanians fell in love. Lucian observed in his compatriots a deep gash of sentiment lacking in the German, Hungarian and Croatian soldiers advancing into Russia: each encounter with a woman was awash in emotion. He fell in love three times. The worst time was with a Kazakh woman with a large nose and thick eyebrows that turned as soft as black lambswool beneath the moonlight. They spoke in broken German; he felt their closeness seize him like the grip of moss on stone. For two weeks they slept together naked beneath sheepskin blankets. In the morning she brought him goat's milk warm from the nanny's teat. At Stalingrad, when the Russian tanks counter-attacked through the fog hanging over the endless snow, Lucian remembered her as the last woman he would touch.

The bunkers of Dumitrescu's Third Army collapsed beneath the Russian artillery fire, burying his comrades. Lucian ran. To his amazement, he did not die. Every man he knew was buried or shot or captured and sent to starve in Siberia. Lucian dodged between two tanks, let the fog cover him and threw himself into a retreating German train. When spring came, he deserted his bivouac in the German camp where he had stolen cabbages to stay alive. He went in search of the village where he had fallen in love. He walked over the plains of scorched, roofless houses, trampled gardens, caved-in stone walls, sheds empty of animals, fields barren of crops. He slept out in the cold and drank rain water caught in his cupped hands to spare himself from dysentery. Two months later, bearded and nearly starving, he was picked up by a straggling Romanian platoon and marched back to Romania with them.

He was demobilized in Bucharest, a hot southern city that, even after a war and an earthquake, felt as alien as America. The streets appeared too wide for mere humans, the gleaming windows of the French pastry shops were impossibly long. The people looked like Turks and Gypsies and Bulgarians all rolled into one yet, in contrast to the mountains of Bucovina, he heard only Romanian spoken. Lucian missed the sounds of German and Ukrainian. He remembered his grandfather, who had thought of himself first as an Austro-Hungarian and only after as a Romanian. Even his mother had never believed in the Greater Romania of the interwar years. Now they lived in a shrivelled Romania, a Sovietized Romania. Where had all these Communists come from? Before the war he knew only young men like himself, who believed in God and in Romania's glorious destiny. Bolshevism had been a Russian illness; he had trusted in God to strike it down. His memories of Stalingrad continued to disturb him. How had the Bolsheviks held out against the combined might of the Christian armies, continuing to fight after even the city's rats and leather belts had been eaten? If they were men without souls, where had they found the strength to outlast a siege by men who prayed to God? Shaken, he kept quiet during the Communist takeover. He told his demobilization committee that he was a shepherd's son from Bucovina who had followed his country's calling during the war and looked forward to helping to rebuild Romania in peace. They sent him to veterinary college. He read and wrote well enough to take notes during the animal anatomy lectures; blessed with a good memory, he passed his exams without difficulty. He met Alina in a cinema, where the shadow of her broad-nosed profile made him start. He went over to speak to her and felt himself longing to caress her beneath a rough blanket. They were married six months later. Lucian was assigned to work in the market, examining animals to certify their health before they were sold. The manager, a hunched man known as Mircea the Old, had been a member of the Communist Party since the 1920s. "You believe in God," he said, his gnarled right hand splayed like a cloven hoof across the rail of a livestock pen. "Men who believed in God tortured me. They ruined my hand."

"If they tortured you," Lucian said, "they were not Christians."

Mircea the Old snorted. "I could have you imprisoned. But if you do your job and keep your beliefs to yourself we can get along."

Religion, though he practised it in secret, became the core of his life. He taught his children their prayers as soon as they were able to speak. Alina taught them that prayers were uttered only in their apartment, in the presence of Mama and Tata. They must be kept secret from playmates. Having grown up in a hilltop village where no one had seen an electric light, Alina revelled in their two-bedroom apartment with heat, electricity and running water. "You shouldn't be so critical of the Communists, Lucian. Thanks to them, we're giving our children comforts we never had. They let me leave my job each time I have a child, and when I'm ready to return my job is waiting for me."

Leaning around the corner of the children's bedroom, Lucian looked at the three small bodies lying side by side: two in wooden cots, the youngest still in a crib. The birth of his children had turned him into a more cautious man. He kept to himself on the morning tram-ride to the market. He acceded to his wife's wishes in family decisions, recognizing that the children's welfare was her first concern. Every summer the government offered them the choice of munti sau mare for their vacation. Mircea the Old, he knew, chose not to take vacations: giving up his privileges was his contribution to building socialism. Though Lucian dreamed of watching his children frolic on Black Sea beaches, he acquiesced with Alina's belief that hiking in the mountains was healthier. The cool evenings in the mountain stations north of Bucharest - Sinaia, Bucegi, Poiana BraSov - raised faint memories of Bucovina. Standing next to Alina as they watched the two older children stumble up a rocky slope, he said: "Perhaps next year we can go to Constanta."

"Lucian, I don't want to spend my vacation afraid that the children may drown. Look at how they love the mountains!"

The revelation came at the end of a day spent examining sheep. He was lying on his bed, neither awake nor asleep, listening to the sounds of Alina making supper. The light was off. And then the room was filled with light. Not an electric light but a pure glimmering, a ray so pristine that a single drop expanded into a vast, translucent space. The garlicky smell of Alina's ciorba de burta vanished. He felt himself enveloped in sweetness. A celestial breath lifted him off the bed. A man of one hundred kilos, he was suspended in the air amid the promise of eternal life. For a few moments he floated among the angels as he might do one day in Heaven. The sweetness intoxicated him with a blissful innocence that deepened his sight. He trembled, terrified by his failure to announce his faith in God to all.

When Alina came to call him for supper he was staring at the ceiling with tears in his eyes.

"What's the matter?"

He sat up, shaking his head.

During supper she looked at him over her soup while urging the children to fill themselves up on bread. That night, when they were alone, she said: "What were you thinking about?"

"Stalingrad." He told her again about the siege. She accepted that a man who had fought in the war would need to talk about it more than once. It was true that Stalingrad had wounded him. The resistance of the bodies without spirits had driven his faith underground. He had continued to observe the Orthodox fast on Friday, eating only food that came from the earth. But his visits to church were rare and furtive. Without his noticing it, his faith was trickling away.

He had been commanded to act. Suspicious of the Orthodox patriarchs, notorious for their collaboration with the government, he visited one of the men who had marched back to Bucharest with him. It took Lucian six months to earn the man's trust. One morning he kissed Alina and his children, boarded the tram to work and stayed on two stops past the market. He climbed into the back of a truck and allowed the lid of a feed vat to be fastened over his head. Eighteen hours later he was home in Bucovina. Two days after that he was in a mountain camp with a stolen Soviet carbine in his hands.

***

During his months in the mountains he often depended on charity. The people of the country's northern fringes were as generous as they were stubborn. Remorseless collectivization of the land had faltered on the flanks of the northern mountains. The villages were remote, the terrain steep and forbidding. Hostile to any notion originating more than a day's walk away, the villagers felled trees across the muddy roads when they heard that Communist Party officials were on their way. Religious men defying Communism were greeted with mamaliga, bowls of soup, a chicken or a lamb shank. Lucian repaid the peasants with advice on the health of their sheep and goats. For eighteen months his renegade guerrilla unit, disowned by the church hierarchy, tweaked the government's tail. They helped the peasants fell trees across roads. When soldiers were sent to clear the trees, Lucian's men attacked their makeshift barracks, blowing up their trucks and jeeps. They fled into the woods to camouflaged camps high in the mountains. For them the war had not ended: they were continuing the battle that had begun when the Soviet tanks had advanced against the besiegers of Stalingrad.

The longer Lucian remained in the mountains the more his years in Bucharest felt like self-deception. He missed his children, but he knew he had come home. The peasants' cottages reminded him of his childhood. Yet, after so many years away, they were also strange: the heathen fertility emblems he used to know by heart irritated him. These people would never be pure Christians, just as they would never be Communists.

During the winter they suspended their campaign. They shot a hibernating bear and moved into its cave. When they had eaten the last bear-steak and snow had drifted across the cave's mouth, the youngest man was sent down the mountain. He returned with permission from the monks to move into an abandoned wooden monastery in a clearing near a tall peak. From the monastery's balcony they could survey the valley down a chute of snow so long and steep that the forests below resembled patches of flat moss. Taking his turn on watch, Lucian imagined that this whiteness was the ocean. In moments when he missed Alina he concentrated on the light that would envelope him when his life ended. The promise of glorious sweetness urged him on. All winter they stockpiled weapons, planning their spring offensive. The boxes of ammunition glowed beneath the roof of the monastery.

The government was consolidating its presence in the region by building a lumberyard and a mill. The mill would offer regular wages; small apartment blocks would be built next to the lumberyard to house workers and their families. The promise of running water and electricity would draw men off their ancestral plots. Once the peasants had left their land, it would be collectivized. At four o'clock on a spring morning, after fervent prayers, Lucian and his comrades attacked the mill with hand grenades. They knocked down the metal fence. Lucian rushed through the gap while his comrades remained poised to cover him. In the darkness he saw the white ends of the logs peering at him like the stacked eyes of owls. He heard the guards shouting. One of them began firing from the door of the hut where they slept. As they opened the door and scanned the yard with their flashlights, they became perfect targets. Lucian shot them both through the chest. He hurried across the springy, woodchip-covered earth and shot the man lying closest to him through the temple. The second man's body shuddered at the impact. "Dumnezeu," he moaned. "Dumnezeu ...."

"You believe in God?" Lucian said. His shoulder ached from the rifle's recoil.

The man curled up like an infant, a rattling audible in his throat. His flashlight lay before his face, its beam glaring against his brow in contorted self-interrogation. Kicking the flashlight aside to prevent it from being stained with blood, Lucian shot the man through the back of the head.

His comrades slipped out of the darkness. They burned down the mill and the lumberyard, and dynamited the foundations of the apartment blocks. Then they scattered, having arranged to take separate routes to a mountain hide-out. They would meet again in five days' time.

The weather turned clear and mild. The first night Lucian slept in the shed of a peasant he had befriended. The peasant's seventeen-year-old daughter never failed to smile at him. In the middle of the night he was awoken by her whispering. The whispers turned to soft laughter as he touched her hand. Lucian kissed the girl and stroked her breasts until he felt her nipples perking up like newborn lambs. He reminded himself of his marriage vows. As the girl's hand slid down his thigh, he nudged her away. "God does not want -"

"If God were alive like us," the girl said, her blue, Slavic-looking eyes edged with pain, "he would not deny himself."

She left. In the morning, bringing him bread and cheese for breakfast, she looked at the dirt floor.

"Why won't you look at me?"

"Because you don't think I'm pretty."

"I think you are pretty but I am a married man." He saw her shoulders straighten, lifting her light brown hair out of her eyes. "I cannot fight for God and spit in God's face."

As he turned away from the farm, he felt exhilarated. He had been equal to God's test! He hiked all day through the trees, climbing the mountainside to the top of an enormous ridge that ran northward into Trans-Carpathia where, if he kept walking, he would find the village where his mother had been born. The Soviet border made such a trek impossible, yet treading the long spine of the mountains, he delighted in the magical balance between earth and sky. In the morning he had been walking through tall forests where his feet rustled last year's dead leaves. By noon the slopes were so steep that he had to walk bent forward. Farms, peasants and dogs vanished. He walked beneath the cover of coniferous trees that clutched the earth between the jutting rocks. In the early afternoon, reaching the top of the ridge, he broke into the open, unafraid of being spotted as he ambled across the green meadows. Approaching the rock-hemmed edge of the ridge he looked down on clouds. In the rents between the clouds he could see the green valley floor interrupted by dark knots of towns. He was staring down on the world from Heaven. That night, taking advantage of the mild weather, he slept in the open. He lay on his back with his pack beneath his head. The flashlight he had taken from the guard made an uncomfortable bulge. He removed it and laid it next to his ear. Heaven hung so near to him that if he reached out with his arm he would scratch the stars. Earth beneath him, Heaven above, his body stretched empty of unruly desires between them: never before had his existence been summarized with such clarity.

He wished he could always sleep on the top of the ridge. The next morning, as he continued his hike northward, he was stopped by a platoon of soldiers. Sceptical of his story that he was going to visit an ailing uncle in a village near the Soviet border, they searched his pack. The Cyrillic lettering on the guard's flashlight condemned him. Three days later he was transported to Gherla.

As they brought him to the prison, the high ridge of its front wall dominating the small town with its ramshackle streets and dishevelled corn patches, he prepared himself to face interrogation by the secret police. The guards turned him over to children. The students, dressed in the pale pyjamas of psychiatric patients, wore identical convict haircuts. Their faces were soft. They approached him with bewildered expressions that turned to panic and hatred. They beat the soles of his feet for hours. They clubbed his buttocks and his thighs; they beat his balls until they swelled up into hard blue potatoes. They pulled a black hood over his head and smashed his skull against the floor. He held his head for days, groaning. His vision blurred. He vomited until his guts were sore. Each time they returned him to the interrogation room the two uniformed guards stood next to the door in silence while the students swarmed over him. Sometimes three or four of them would beat different parts of his body at once. When they looked him in the eyes, he stared straight through them. They were bodies without souls; he could never match their fury.

He understood how the defenders of Stalingrad had turned back the Christian armies.

After six months the beatings stopped. His interrogations, though they sometimes still involved torture, were conducted by men who sat behind bright lamps and asked him the names of his co-conspirators. They recited his acts of sabotage in detail, surprising him with details he had not expected them to know. One of his interrogators - the polite one, whose job was to win his confidence - told him that the students were dissidents who had been psychologically reconstructed into a state where they were panting to torture fellow dissidents. "An intriguing experiment," the man said. "But the program has been discontinued."

After he told them everything he knew, the interrogations ceased. He was a prisoner: nothing more. His cell was a narrow rectangle with a high ceiling and no window. It contained a cot, a blanket and a bucket. In winter, wrapped in the blanket, he shivered. One spring Gherla flooded and he had to stand on his cot for two days while murky water slurped around his ankles. He forced himself to keep standing by dreaming of the sea. He would watch sun-bright water breaking on the beach where his children swam.

By the time the flood receded the weaker prisoners had died. Unable to remain standing, they had lain down on their cots and drowned. Their bodies were rolled into the wide corridor dividing the rows of cells. The prisoners were released from their cells in pairs to drag away the bodies. Lucian was teamed with a frail old man whose broken right hand could barely grasp the dead man's wrist. As they hauled on the cadaver, the old man said: "Don't you recognize me, Lucian? You put me here."

Mircea the Old had become ancient. His waist was as thin as a broomhandle. The flesh had been scraped from beneath his slackened face. "What are you doing here?" Lucian whispered. "You're one of them."

"Because of you they didn't believe me." Mircea gasped as they dragged the body around a corner. A truck had backed up to the door. Its exhaust pipe pumped fumes into the corridor. "That's what I get for my charity. After you disappeared, they held me responsible. I should have reported you the first time you prated about God."

"I didn't think -"

"You didn't think about me. And look at your wife and children."

"What about my wife and children?"

"Stop talking!" the guard said. They had reached the truck. They pushed the body onto the pile of corpses. The dead man's curled right leg snagged around another corpse's stiffened arm. They pushed until they sweated. The dead man lunged onto the top of the pile. Lucian realized how weak he had become. One of the corpses belched, unleashing a vomit-like smell that made Lucian double over.

A guard straightened him up with a jab of his rifle butt. "Back to your cells!"

Lucian looked in the direction of Mircea the Old. Mircea ignored him as they took him away.

Lucian's cell stank. He prayed for hours, kneeling on the moist silt the flood had deposited on the floor. He had always acted according to the vision that God had sent him. On his second-last night of freedom he had renounced the temptation of making love with a beautiful girl. He could feel the shape of her breasts filling his palms. Though he had regretted ten thousand times not having taken advantage of this last opportunity to make love as a man in his prime, he knew that by refusing he had fulfilled God's design. It was as God's emissary that he had left his family, and as God's instrument that he had shot the Communist guard who remembered his faith in his dying moments. Mircea the Old's imprisonment, too, formed part of God's plan. Everything, Lucian thought, must be as it is. He himself was in Gherla for a reason. His body was growing thinner and weaker for a reason. Nothing could wish to be different. That night, as he closed his eyes on his sodden cot, he remembered his final night of freedom, poised between Heaven and Earth. He felt the grass growing beneath his back.

***

They released him in 1959. He weighed fifty-seven kilos, a little more than half his weight when he was imprisoned. He was assigned to work on a collective farm in Oltenia. For the first month he slept in a barn. The heat sapped him; he had less strength than a boy of ten. One day the foreman told him he was moving to a cabin. When he reached the door he found the cabin occupied by a large-nosed woman with grey hair and three surly adolescents.

It took him a long time to accept that this was his family.

Alina would not speak to him. The children were tall, strong, yet taciturn. He looked at them one by one. Ion, named after Lucian's father, had Alina's face. He was a gruff, severe boy, almost fifteen. Doina, who was fourteen, followed her mother in everything. He understood that as long as silence persisted between him and his wife, he would hear little from his daughter. Radu, the youngest, was a lively boy who did not remember their apartment in Bucharest. He spoke in a slippery Oltenian dialect, using the literary past tense. When Lucian cocked his head to listen to him, Radu would smile. Then his smile faltered and he hurried away.

His children were not as devout as he had hoped, but he could see that Alina had brought them up well. They were diligent at school, they helped their mother with her chores, they worked on the collective farm. One night as he and Alina lay side by side on the bed without touching he said: "You've done a good job with them."

"Someone had to. Their father thought other things were more important."

"If we could have changed the life of the country," he whispered, barely daring to utter the words even in the blackness of the rural night, "the life of my family would have changed as well."

"After all that's happened," Alina said, "how can you still be a dreamer?"

He felt relieved that they were beginning to talk.

It took him a year of regular meals and work in the fields to approach his former body weight. Three months into the year he felt his body growing alert to women's flesh, yet he held off from reaching for Alina until he was certain she would receive him. When she did, they felt bathed in sadness, overwhelmed by memories of how they had made love when they were young. "Was it really worth it?" she said, the skin below her eyes stained with tears.

"God sent me a vision. To spurn it would have been blasphemy."

"You and I will never understand each other." She rolled over, showing him her back.

The children began to approach him. They had grown up assuming their father existed solely in their mother's imagination. Once they had become used to the idea of having a father, his reappearance became a gift. Radu lost his shyness and chatted about his soccer exploits, Doina asked him in a hushed voice about Bucovina. His relations with Ion were more troubled. The boy's friends had told him about Gherla. He seemed to be stifled by his awareness of his father's suffering. Caught between broaching the subject and apparently feeling humiliated by it, he bowed his head.

In 1965, when the young liberalizer Ceausescu became Romania's leader, they received permission to return to Bucharest. Their new apartment was in a decaying block farther off the Metro line than the apartment where they had lived after the war. The children, though older than most students, were allowed to study. They spoke of the daring books they were reading: books that until recently had been banned. "Be careful," Alina told them. "Don't take any chances. Look at what happened to your father."

Lucian prayed to God to give him patience.

***

He stood at the gas station staring at a truck. The train had disappeared around a bend. As always now, he was escorted by the past. He felt himself retreating from life with backward steps, his blood bearing him towards his youth. Most days the past overtook his present, plans for activity foundering in formless musings. This morning he had pushed himself to fill his pack, walk to the station and buy a first-class ticket. Now, having reached his destination, he realized that though the village in the valley had become almost unrecognizable - the post-war apartment blocks crumbling, pizza restaurants and internet cafés on the main square, few peasants in wagons and many big trucks - the distance to the mountains was far greater than he remembered.

"You want to go to the mill, sir?" the truck driver said. "I'll take you." As the road climbed and turned to dirt, the driver shifted down through the gears. A red decal pasted to the windshield absorbed the hot sunlight. "The Norwegian flag," the driver explained. "A Norwegian logging company bought the mill last year."

Lucian watched the trucks rolling downhill like barges on wheels, carrying logs to the railway line. Munti sau mare: his dispute with Alina had been pointless. The mountains were his sea. He wished it were not too late to tell her that.

"Here we are, sir," the driver said, parking outside the gates.

Lucian climbed out of the truck. Had the mill been rebuilt during the Ceausescu years, or more recently by these Norwegians? He watched the gates swing open, disgorging a log-heavy truck. An intercom system blared Western music. The guard at the gate swigged a soft drink. He felt springy shavings beneath his feet as he observed the concrete yard. Is this what I fought for? Or is this what I fought to destroy? In his mind he heard a man in Communist garb calling out to God.

"Are you all right, sir?" the driver asked. "You got somewhere to go?"

Lucian stared at the forest. Beyond the beeches and ash dwindling to patchy coniferous bush, alpine meadows glimmered on the edge of the sky. "Yes," he said, setting out towards a path rising between the trees.