Poems
THE
BLUNTED BULLET OF MY HOMELAND
You,
lucky dog,
The blunted bullet of my homeland
Whistled past my ear
Striking the wall with a mute sound
Like a gong at the century’s end.
During the time of revolutions
Along the walls lurks the shadows
Of those who still have something to lose.
Only thin adolescents
March in the middle of boulevards
Mimicking our lost courage.
I nearly almost penetrated the old plaster
Of a medieval house
I could sense communism's dampness
Drying out
Thickened over layers of obedience
And I now free dare to cough
Hand covering my mouth.
How can you still believe in revolutions
When lame ballerinas atop tanks dance the lambada
And above our heads
Penalty kicks are shot from cannons
Until all the winners learn
How to recycle a putrid era.
We, the uninitiated, confuse the sound of lead
With divine microphone tests
After which nothing follows
But the holes between the longed-for words
And some real corpses
Who don't know where to go.
The trigger is pulled by as many fingers
As can be fitted
In a small chapter of a hidden history
The real targets exchange
Their evening dress
And soldiers their uniforms.
We, the losers, grow concentric circles
Like trees cut every year
Out of habit.
UP
LESSON OF
SURREALISM
I had to
recover
After an ailment more or less imaginary
In the highest resort
The waters I drank
Trickled straight down from the clouds
I would pass out three times a day
Despite the carefully painted panorama
And the clean glasses
On which our fingerprints
Took the shapes of other lives.
I was only a meticulous cougher
Waiting in line for the springs
Which dried unexpectedly
And I would've been bored to death if Fellini
Had not shot a movie there.
After an audition I got the role
Of a middle-aged man
Who in a short scene
Had to mimic
As many contradictory feelings as possible.
The camera was among the clouds
And Fellini cut furiously scene after scene.
"Signore," he shouted,
"You don't know anything about surrealism
You like it, but when you shed your snakeskin
You drop your cloth like an exhausted man.
I will give you a lesson after all."
He showed our old house
Where my grandmother cut potatoes underground
And myself at 10,
Hidden in the hey barn,
Lit my first cigarette.
"With such a scene I could blow up
An entire lifestyle
But now I record you coughing unconvincingly
If you show me where you threw the lit match
You can imagine all the women in your life
Happily gathered to serve you dinner.
Or is it too early for that?
Now raise that glass.
The glass, not the collar, signore,
Much, much higher,
Ready, lights, camera! Action!"
UP
POMPEII
It’s
all your fault
You the
discoverer of my brain
Archeological relic buried in a lava of lust
As that
petrified dog in Pompeii
Tied to
the brothel’s door
Just when
Vesuvius erupted.
Those
people knew everything about sex
It was
there behind the door
Bringing
good luck
Ready to
hold your hat.
Priapus
was weighing his sex for gold
While shy
vestals threw coins on scale
Pushing
for their chances.
What a
city Pompeii
Made to
absolve you of shame and inhibitions
Only 5
euro the entrance.
-I hoped
you were a woman
A lady
told me this days
Thinking
that all women’s doctors are XX
And the Y
chromosome is just a hanger
Loaded
with bras and underwear.
-It’s
true, I told her, we all were women sometime
Every
beginning is feminine
One
beginning, two beginnings
One end,
two ends, we conjugate
Like
Buddhists do with life.
Sometimes
I wish I am a woman
To feel
in their skin the goose bumps
When get
aroused
And put
stardust on their lips.
To give
birth at least once, on a cliff
Where
nobody could see me.
I pass my
hand through my beard
As
through a forest of birch trees
And ask
myself why all this cold war between sexes
In all
this confusion
When
everything is divided, parceled out
The
genetic code stretched on table
Like a
bear fur laid out to dry,
And we,
stuffed turkeys prank around
Before
the grand hunting.
Why this
morbid desire of the philosophers
To find
the God sex
A huge
one for sure, unseen yet
As is the
life after death,
Sucked by
the black holes,
Hidden in
some three-dimensional fold
Called
the scrotum of Chronos.
Because
Time himself should have an organ
A
bisexual one
As he
penetrates us with equal pleasure.
Everything, the philosophers say
Comes
from a primary copulation.
Death is
a woman for sure, I feel that
One with
sharp labia.
A woman
at the beginning, one at the end
A woman
cannot be conjugated in any way.
Everything happens in her womb
As I a
quarantine
Where
somebody changes I.D. on our chest
Anonymous
soldiers
Disappeared in an inexplicable fog.
UP
ONLY
TODAY
I’m
crawling, I’m crawling
Today I’m
the worm himself
Devouring
his own sickness
I’m in an
invertebrate state
In which
with a bit of will
I could
wet the flowers in the garden
With
myself.
I would
tickle their roots
With all
my jelly thoughts
I would
turn on all this sexless slugs
Which
shamelessly multiplies themselves.
UP
LAWYER
WITH SWORDFISH
Above
the court house hovers lots of pigeons,
The
fatter ones.
Justice
is like a growth hormone
Put in
our milk, water, air and TV screen
We burst
with pride watching how our leaders
Feed the
sky birds with seeds and words
Those
kind which germinates just once
You spit
them out and get directly bread, pizza
Or
yeasted dough
As would
have been the Moses’ dough
If he’d
have time and water.
With one
hand, the blindfolded justice
Reads in
Braille
Secret
messages and bills.
The other
hand holds the balance
On which
the same fat pigeons
Spread
shit unevenly.
The God’s
word is not classified anymore
Blown in
the big chief’s ear
Gets to
us as an echo
Sneaked
through the keyhole.
Patience
has the interest up.
The
pigeons multiply faster
Have
claws and tough feathers.
The
lawyers decorate their offices
With
sweet family pictures
And the
same image
Of a
swordfish
Caught in
Caribbean in a working vacation.
UP
THE EGG
It is the Easter night
And my mother is dying eggs red.
Only one egg,
An egg like any other, oval and organic,
Doesn't want to take the color.
In spite of her fasting and prayers
It stays white
Like the walls of the churches in Rhodos.
"It might be a miracle," she says simply.
I, the one who doesn't believe in miracles
Squeeze a big drop of blood over it
And the egg turns paler than death.
Such a thing has never been seen before.
The media burst into our lives.
The egg is featured in the news
While ignored icons weep in vain.
The church keeps silent. The pope waves.
Research is conducted,
Speculations are raised,
The colors of the rainbow tasted.
The Bible is bought wildly
And even read.
Thousands of people come in droves
To see the egg
Donating their blood like uncalled-for martyrs
Maybe a drop will turn it red
To save appearances.
Even a prize of millions is set
Plus a front seat for Resurrection Day.
The line gets longer,
Religions are insignificant, races count even less.
We are finally one transparent race
With the sun shining behind us.
The egg is bathed in waves of blood
Soaked into the ground uselessly,
It becomes a national crisis.
Taken to Ireland, Kosovo, and Jerusalem
Wherever blood flows plentifully.
It stays white
With divine stubbornness.
It's placed to be hatched.
The whole planet watches
The hen's behind
Waiting for a sign within the shell.
From which strange words
Seem to be heard.
Maybe they carry the secret of life and death
And we don't understand anything
Of this language of the egg.
Cardinals gather, rabbis, shamans
Even the Dalai Lama dressed in red
Embraces the idea happily.
Finally, my mother is brought, the egg-dyer
Who, swamped with chores, has forgotten the story.
She listens to the egg
She weighs it in her hand
Like a new beginning,
And throws it at the sun.
UP
Fiction
Excerpts
from the book of memoirs
Between
Two Worlds – Tales of a Women’s Doctor
CHERNOBYL,
LATE REPORT
I am
driving on Queens
highway, rushing toward the hospital where I’m on call. The radio is blasting,
as usual, set to my favorite classic rock channel. Then the 8 o’clock
news. The stock market plummets every day, the votes are being counted endlessly
in Florida, and the Ukrainian nuclear station of Chernobyl has finally closed.
Fourteen years after the infamous explosion, the estimated number of victims is
30,000. I doubt that figure includes my grandfather and to this day, I’m sure
that’s what led to his end.
I work
with Vladimir, a Russian resident and I mention the radio report to him. The
news leaves him indifferent and speechless, as if nothing had ever happened.
Many Russian immigrants are skeptical when it comes to the events that took
place in their country. I’m not sure if they do it out of decency, some original
guilt, or as a reflex of silence well reinforced for several generations.
In the spring of 1986 in Chernobyl,
the atoms escaped Soviet authority and rose to the sky. From then on,
catastrophe plagued that part of the world. If the wind had blown eastward, it
would have probably been another well-hidden nuclear disaster. But the wind blew
West, where the Geiger-Muller meters got jerky and nervous. In Romania the media
finally reacted, warning the population. We were really surprised, because
mystification was part of the regime’s routine. This time it was their fault
entirely; those Russians, the ones we’d always feared, were to blame. We had
always been prepared for a potential imperialist attack, a very generic one. But
we knew it was about them, our neighbors in the East, the ones who, after
shoving communism down our throats, amused themselves by watching us surpass
their own fanaticism and absurdity.
Now the
evil came from above. Uncontrollable. Trapped in radioactive clouds, without a
visa, it hovered above Europe.
Romania found herself a couple of steps away from the disaster. I took a few
days off from the hospital where I worked in Brasov
and drove North to Bistrita where my parents lived.
It was
hot, I was sweating a lot but I didn’t dare open the car window. I was traveling
through an area of increased level of radioactivity according to the radio, and
I sped up, as if I were trying to evade the danger as soon as possible. Almost
nobody on the road. Something not unusual, since gas had recently been rationed.
A few goats and cows peacefully grazed the radioactive grass at the side of the
road; they were tied to a tree with ropes long enough to reach the road and the
passing cars. Old German villages with large stone houses, their mortar
crumbling off for ages, Middle Age churches with slanted towers, geese,
bicyclists, carts, a toddler crossing the street on all fours, the screech of
breaks which, thank God, work well and stop the car in time.
The
elderly motionless on the porch, waiting to see who passed by. The radioactivity
drifting high above didn’t count for them. At the edge of each village, or
wherever you expected it least, old propagandistic billboards, featuring the
most idiotic and unexpected slogans. On one you could still make out the
ridiculous protest “Say NO to the neutron bomb!” A goat, tied to the pillar of
the ad foraged. Many posters dating back to the triumphant days of communism had
been removed, outdated by reality. The milk had long disappeared from the dairy
shop on my street. Eventually, all the billboards, now rendered unnecessary,
were removed: “Not one day of the week without milk” or “Milk, dairy- a fountain
of youth and health.” With no milk for sale these slogans sounded like a call
for rebellion.
In
Bistrita, I find the door locked. My neighbor tells me that my folks are in the
country at my grandfather’s village. That means 20 more kilometers of narrow
highway, other villages, and cows grazing on the side of the road. The area is
full of vineyards and plum orchards. That translates into wine and plum brandy-
another fountain of youth and health. After all, who knows what these neutrons
will taste like distilled in the fall?!
Finally, at the top of the hill I glimpse my grandfather’s village
buried in greenness. One more turn to the first house. At the border of the
village, the same crucified Christ made of tin zinc painted with faded color
and rattling with every breeze. I glance at it and just as each time I drive by,
trying later to remember to ask my father what the initials I.N.R.I. above the
Savior’s head, stand for. I never do it, because I suspect what will
follow. My lack of religious knowledge will exasperate him.
“For
Christ’s sake, you don’t even know that!” he would say with a sigh. “Your
generation was raised completely outside of God. You have no basic notions of
faith and religion.” Then his tone would change and he would add: “After all,
it’s not your fault. This damn system…”
After the war he studied theology, training to become a
Greek-Catholic priest. Romanians from
Transylvania
were Orthodox until the end of seventeen century. Encouraged by Austrians they
switched to Catholicism, just to belong to Rome.
They were called Greek-Catholics because they kept the old Orthodox rite and
tradition. Had my father succeeded to become a Catholic priest, I would have
still been born, because they could marry, like Orthodox priests. The communists
threw him in prison, where he was stuck for almost a year, until Catholicism,
forbidden overnight in Romania,
was abolished. He hated to be reminded of that period and didn’t talk about it.
God’s
ways are hard to grasp, and a few years later he began to teach history and
social sciences. Though he remained faithful, he didn’t walk into a church again
for many years. He prayed at home with my mother. A professor could lose his
tenure if he was caught in any church, including an Orthodox one, despite the
fact that the leaders of the Orthodox Church had reached a pact with the leaders
of the communist nomenclature, and granted them honorable mention during each
Sunday mass.
On my 21st
birthday, my father finally told me I wasn’t Orthodox, but baptized a Greek
Catholic. My conversion as a child had been his last “heresy.” One night,
assisted by my mother, they hid me in diapers and took me to a priest who
baptized me according to the Catholic rite. The revelation of this secret,
carefully guarded for so many years, didn’t change my life in any way. It didn’t
make it more Catholic or more Orthodox. At that age I didn’t even know what
I.N.R.I. meant and I continued to make the sign of the cross in the Orthodox way,
from right to left.
Only my
grandparents, who had nothing to lose, continued to instill in us some religious
education. At school, some teachers had tried to get God out of our heads, but I
felt early on, that wherever the cross began it ended in the same place. And
instincts shaped in childhood are difficult to change.
The year I was baptized, Stalin’s corpse had barely grown cold in the
Kremlin wall, filling his subjects with a false feeling of freedom. My
grandfather got drunk when he found out about the dictator’s death. The rest of
the world, brainwashed and still paralyzed with fear, sent condolence letters
and stupid telegrams addressed to the Kremlin. The great Russian people mourned
their vanished godfather. My grandfather wrote a poem exulting with joy, even
tinted with streaks of premature hope dangerous during those times. Luckily, my
grandmother could read and stopped the letter from being mailed in time.
Born in
1900 under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, my grandfather had outlived two world
wars and many more uprisings. He didn’t blame much the Hungarians or the Germans,
but the Russians, who, in ’44-’45, had come to Romania as liberators but behaved
like savage invaders. Hardened by the war, communism and vodka, their every step
was marked by disaster. The soldiers confiscated all the wristwatches, a
complete novelty to them. They seized all the animals, gold and silverware from
the households, and executed people deemed guilty for no reason.
That same
year my grandfather lost all his pigs and livestock. “If the Germans or the
Hungarians camped in the village and needed meat or wine, they would buy them.
When the Russians arrived, an officer with ten watches on each hand entered our
courtyard with two soldiers, opened the door of the stable and gunned down all
the animals. They almost shot your great grandfather who had climbed up to the
barn loft for hay. The officer went into the storeroom and fired a few shots
at the wine casks. The wine spilled out through the holes and they filled some
canisters with it, even their helmets, and then left the rest flowing over on
the floor. They were angry because he had no vodka”
When I
was a kid in Bistrita, on Freedom Day we had to stay on duty by the soviet
heroes’ monument. We wore a red tie around our neck and carried a wooden rifle.
No fight had taken place in the area. By the time the Russians arrived in 1944,
the Germans and the Hungarians had withdrawn a long time ago. The five soviet
hero soldiers buried there had died in my high school from methyl alcohol
intoxication. They had burst into the school’s small natural science museum and
gulped down all the alcohol in which the lizards were conserved.
On that
radioactive day of 1986 I found my grandfather in the garden. It was beautiful
and warm and he was on his knees, gathering, still raw spring potatoes. Nobody
could convince him to stay inside the house.
“What are
you doing, granddaddy?” I asked, watching him from behind.
He seemed
to be half-buried in the ground. I had forgotten that he had hearing problems,
and I tapped him on the shoulder. He turned and smiled at me blandly, as if we
had just seen each other yesterday.
“Why are
you collecting potatoes on your knees?”
“I have a
hard time bending. It’s easier this way, and I sink into the ground little by
little,” he said with a chuckle.
“Go
inside, granddaddy, the air is filled with radiation from the Russians.”
“I
couldn’t care less about their radiation! I know what happened. That is why I’m
outside plucking these raw potatoes, before rain comes and spoils them. We have
to eat something during the winter; otherwise we’ll go into the ground.”
His
ancient instinct for conservation still functioned properly. After the death of
my grandmother, with whom he had lived for 60 years, life didn’t mean much to
him. It was just a holy necessity that had to be carried all the way.
“How have
you been, my son? I heard you’re become a ladies’ doctor,” he said with a
mischievous smile. “I don’t think you made a bad choice, if that’s what you like.
Anyway, I’m still sorry you didn’t become a priest. You would have had a much
easier life. Since these communists took over, even the priests don’t have much
to do with God. You could have joined our parish, sang a little on Sundays in
the church, and for most of the time done business with me.”
For all
he could remember, his ancestors bred sheep, cows and horses. He added bees. Now
he had given up everything, had sold the animals and beehives and filled the
stable with an odd system of small water basins where nutria, those furry
rodents recently introduced in Romania, swam. People from surrounding villages
gathered as if drawn to a zoo, to see my grandfather’s “rats”, the first ones to
break the tradition of the ruminators.
After the Chernobyl
explosion, vegetables in the garden had to be thrown away because of the
radioactive contamination, but people didn’t take radio announcements too
seriously. Nobody cared about air pollution. Ecology was regarded as a snooty
whim.
Even so, back then in the markets, groceries and fruits were tested with a
radiation detector every morning and thrown away if they exceeded the limit. It
broke the peasants’ hearts because the radiation caused their products to swell
nicely, and made bright colored attractive shapes. The women waiting in lines or
swarming in the market had become experts in nuclear fusion overnight, offering
informed comments about the half-time of plutonium. Something had finally
happened! In Barla, my grandfather’s village, nothing had ever really happened.
The era between the two world wars glided over the village like a monotonous,
homogenous paste. Only marriages, births, and funerals interrupted the
collective boredom, a word that didn’t even make it in the local vocabulary.
Whenever something crucial happened in the world, if the shock wave
eventually reached the village, the peasants figured the end of the world had
come. They had a curious intuition for the apocalypse, although I’m not sure if
they thought it would ever include them. Collectivization had cut the deepest
wound, when the land the peasants were organically linked with, was taken away
by force. That made them suffer fiercely, as if they had been completely tossed
out of history.
For them,
the end of the world would have been liberation, almost a revenge against fate.
Instead they came together, built brick houses, brought electricity to the
village and formed some sort of connection with the world outside. They didn’t
buy into Gagarin’s flight because it came from the Russians. Only the landing on
the Moon in 1969 made them wonder. The much-expected Americans didn’t appear
fully convincing, but television had even altered their hermetic world. Half the
village believed it was a lie, half a blasphemy that infuriated God, who would
quicken their end. The invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 had been a clear sign
of the approaching apocalypse.
My
grandfather didn’t care about that event, but he had already crafted an
evacuation plan for the animals in the stable, at the first sign of a Russian
invasion. Anyway according to him, the final end would most probably come in the
year 2000 and that they could certainly not escape.
I think
that only the Vikings, following their baptizing, believed any more in the end
of the world, exactly 1000 years ago. That year nothing else was planted besides
beer hops. Then, at the end of the first millennium they withdrew peacefully,
patiently waiting for the inevitable event. They drank all their beer,
sacrificed all the animals and got most women pregnant. Nothing made any more
sense. They had no Chinese or Jewish people around, to tell them that time had
started well before Christ. What an enormous farce; there was a strange feeling
of liberation when they saw that nothing had happened. They went back to work,
thanking God for postponing the end of the world for another 1000 years.
In the year 2000 nobody talked about the end of the world. Just the
fear that a few expired computers, messed up by too many zeros, would ruin the
world order.
In 1986
nobody saw the Chernobyl
explosion as an apocalyptic event. Communism had soured in its own juices, to
such an extent that people stopped believing in a dramatic conclusion. They had
a feeling of gradual, lamentable defeat, lacking any drama or glory.
In 2000 I wasn’t in Birla to hear the old men predict the
inescapable. My mother told me that they somehow resembled the old Vikings,
except that the peasants hadn’t worked the land for the past 20 years. Instead,
I was in New York, on Brighton Beach, at the edge of the new Russian
neighborhood. At sunset, when the beach had emptied, a black man carefully
walked a metal detector above the sand. When his device signaled something, it
sifted the sand in search of lost golden necklaces and earrings. The man was
performing the same actions as the people who had walked the Geiger-Muller
detectors above the irradiated salads and radishes in the vegetable market in
Bistrita.
A year
later my grandfather got sick. His ganglions swelled and the biopsy diagnosed a
malign lymphoma that would soon grow. It was a form of lymphatic cancer unusual
for his age group. I saw him one last time before his death. He waited
peacefully and resignedly for the end, since he had always expected it.
Individual, personal, not collective and apocalyptic. I and some of my family
members, had used most our energy trying to escape the communist camp. Our dream
back then was a passport or a miraculous escape.
“My
passport has arrived, son,” he told me with a smile.
He passed
away that winter, during a violent cold. The earth had frozen, and six people
took turns to make room for him into the ground. If he had lived for two more
years, he would have seen the end of communism, and his beloved land returned.
It was the last funeral I witnessed at the countryside. Nothing in the ritual
had changed for centuries. That last evening, the old men in the village came to
the mass to say their good-byes. They arrived one by one and whispered to each
other, raising their shoulders with a studied resignation:
“What can
you do?” “Nothing you can do!”
They
drank boiled plum brandy, played cards after midnight, as usual, remembered the
wars, collectivization and the communism. The next day they took the coffin out
to the courtyard and drank again over it, for the soul of the dead. Professional
mourners from three villages start crying loudly, dropping frozen tears, scaring
away the crows watching from the trees, as well as death’s phantom encircling
the village.
Before we
got to the cemetery we stopped ten times, listening to the wailing of the
priests and the dogs barking in the neighbors’ yards. At every stop I had to
deposit 10 lei under a cross. I could have deposited 100 at a time so we could
move forward faster. My grandfather’ body was light, but the whole village had
to observe the funeral procession, and especially observe us, the city folk.
Once we arrived, the snow was so high that it covered the crosses, and we hardly
found the grave.
Back at
his house two long tables were set underneath the fir tree that my grandfather
had planted when I was born. Next to it the old beehive lay abandoned. The
people wore long traditional peasant coats made of sheepskin, and the men wore
heavy fur hats. They ate the home-made noodle soup and cabbage rolls in silence.
A warm steam rose from the pot and from people, melting the snow on the branches
of the fir tree. The sweep of the old well began to shift by itself, and some
old women saw a cloud of bees which rushed out of the frozen hive and flew over
the garden.
“They
carry the old man’s soul,” they whispered.
The
number of the people suffering from cancer grew. Everyone forgot about the
clouds of radiation that had bit into our chromosomes and genes. Nobody saw the
effects more vividly than us, the gynecologists. The most affected ones were
travelers caught on the road by the explosion during that spring of ’86. Nature
dealt with its anomalies by eliminating many troubled pregnancies, therefore
raising the number of spontaneous abortions. The phenomenon passed unnoticed,
because back then any abortion was suspected as deliberate.
The full
effects appeared only seven to eight months later, when the number of malformed
newborn babies had reached worrisome quota. The ultrasound existed only in
theory, rendering prevention impossible. We couldn’t treat the fetus as a
patient. We could only pronounce it dead or alive by listening to its heartbeat
with a tin funnel.
More and
more often we saw an encephalic fetuses or with spinal bifid, and other types of
rare deformities. The birth of a child with two heads and three hands, actually
an extremely rare case of joined twins, led us to believe that there must be
some connection between Chernobyl and what we saw more and more often.
We all needed something extreme and out of the ordinary to drag us
out of the lethargy and loathing into which we had slowly plunged. A child with
two heads was truly something shocking. The house keepers in the hospital had
interpreted this as a sign from above. Many nurses had joined them. The party
secretary skimmed through an old edition of Dialectic Materialism, while we, the
doctors, tried to explain it scientifically, reading our dusty old medical books.
The
notion of statistics, or research, was brutally prevented by the same party
secretary who wouldn’t make the connection between cause and effect. I am sure
that she knew about the drawer of death but this topic didn’t concern her.
We all
knew about the drawer in the ward for newborn babies, and nobody doubted the
judgment of the ward’s chief. A critically malformed newborn, with lesions that
made survival impossible, was not only rejected from the incubator, but also
placed in a drawer that closed hermetically, helping it to die faster. Rumors
spread fast in the hospital and I never heard about the drawer being used in a
case where there was some chance of life for the newborn. Then I saw many
fetuses with anencephaly, condemned children, lacking the brain. Some could
still breathe and survive at the vegetal level for a few hours.
One of them already occupied the drawer when another was born. They
wrapped the newborn in more diapers, and then abandoned it to agony infant on a
table in an isolated room. I went there one night while on call, to smoke and
finish my case notes. It was a calm room, and I was trying to catch my breath
for a few minutes, away from the madness of the delivery room. It was so quiet
that I could hear to the ticking of my watch. Then I heard a strange hiccup. I
looked around. Just me. Another spastic hiccup, like that of a man about to
choke. In front of me, on a table, I saw a hand stretching from a pile diapers,
revealing its malformed body. It breathed loudly one more time, and then it
withdrew forever in the pile of diapers, like a mummy embalmed while still alive.
We had all heard about euthanasia, but nobody talked about it. We felt
like mere guinea pigs ourselves, victims of a huge experiment, in which several
annihilation methods were tested. In 1987 our lives had reached a peak of
poverty and frustration. Deprived of heat, water and food, light. Freedom had
disappeared a long time ago, and hope was just a useless word in the dictionary.
But dark humor flourished. It was our defense mechanism.
“Why don’t you try cyanide Mister President?” one joke went. “Your people are
very resilient.”
UP
MY SECOND
BIRTH
My second
birth was very difficult. At first I didn’t even know who I was anymore. I
remember the look on the face of the black immigration officer, browsing through
the papers I had just filled out. I thought my English was pretty good. I had
understood all the questions, except the question regarding my race. The choices
were Caucasian, African American, Asian, Hispanic or “Other”. Back then, nothing
surprised me. I checked “Other”, stunned by the lack of the choice “white”.
The
officer, an African American, gazed at me from underneath her fake eyelashes and
shook her head with compassion. Without addressing me, she marked “Caucasian”
with red ink, clanking the dozens of golden bracelets that stretched all the way
to her elbow. Thus I found out who I was in America. I wasn’t white, or
European, but Caucasian. To this day, that word doesn’t sound right. I don’t
think that they were aware of that anywhere in Romania or Europe. The Caucasus,
as far as I knew, is a mountain chain in the former Soviet
Union,
separating Europe from Asia. There, somewhere on the top of Ararat, according to
legend, Noah’s ark stopped and the world began after the deluge.
In Europe
we learned early to which ethnic group we belonged. It was clear to us from the
very beginning, and we carried with us a label that marked us for the rest of
our lives. Americans, who play God with geography, throw the French, Greeks,
Swedish, Russians, English and Bulgarians in the same Caucasian pot. It’s called
being “politically correct”, but it actually didn’t bother me at all, since I
was sick of European prejudices and labels tattooed on each forehead.
I was the last one waiting in the endless line formed every morning at
7:30 a.m. in front of the 80-story-high immigration building in Federal Plaza,
New York. Eyeing at that line, I realized that we, the Caucasians, were a small
minority .10 per cent at most. And I heard some of them speaking Romanian. All
we wanted was to be accepted by this country of immigrants where we promised to
behave well and pay our taxes.
Traveling to New York was my first foray into the West. And I hadn’t
come here as a tourist. I was 36 years old and I had 12 years of experience as a
doctor. Suddenly, I was just another face in the crowd, just a potential
immigrant in the great melting pot, an awkward sleepwalker roaming on the
streets with a great question mark above his head. Nothing matched what I had
already learned. I stared at my reflection in the windows of the shops that I
passed and I couldn’t recognize my eyes and the dark circles underneath them.
Still, I experienced an odd feeling of déjà vu, as if I were cut off from a
dream. I didn’t feel like a complete stranger here, thanks to the people of this
veritable Babylon.
During
the first weeks I measured this new territory on foot, trying to assess it in my
mind, take its pulse, and evaluate my chances. It was a large open space,
without fences, and if I could wake up tomorrow, if I had a place to go and
could do what I did best, I would have no adjustment problems. But the most
difficult part was waking up and not going anywhere. Before, I had led a very
active life, and I was discovering how painful it was not to work.
Many
people told me that my chances to practice my specialty again were very slim.
This kind of statement had considerably shaken my motivation. It was difficult
to picture myself doing anything else and throwing 12 years of experience in the
garbage bin. Whenever I saw a pregnant woman on the street, I looked away. She
was outside my sphere of influence, outside my territory. I wasn’t even allowed
to write prescriptions. I would have worked in a hospital under any
circumstances, even without a salary, just to do something.
With
every day that passed, I seemed to lose something irrevocable. The woman who had
brought me here, and whom I was supposed to marry, had become distant,
suspicious, and had lost her faith in me. She had placed her bet on a winning
horse, which was not yet admitted to participate in any race. For now, I
ruminated alone on my less than promising perspectives. I had even forgotten how
to laugh, since I was continually forced to find new survival resources. I lived
like that, wavering between two worlds, for a long time.
When I
say I was born a second time, I’m not just using a figure of speech. I should
be given some credit, because I’ve been in this business for over 20 years.
After all, this was the most difficult birth I ever assisted, my rebirth in
America, after 36 years.
My head
swelled as soon as I landed in Kennedy airport, and it stayed like that for
years to come. I had to feed it a little bit of everything, but the most
difficult part was starting to study everything all over again. I read somewhere
that the our brain only uses five percent of its capacity. That’s probably the
only reason why my mind didn’t explode during those two or three years, like a
Thanksgiving turkey. In this phase you’re like a newborn baby, full of meconium
and shit. Nobody wants to hug you. I had to get up by myself, only after I
mastered walking on all fours.
I had a hard time finding my place during that period of new
beginnings, I was alone and disoriented, crushed by a city deemed the center of
the world, or the world’s greatest trap if you didn’t belong. I didn’t belong to
it yet. I wasn’t born yet in New York
City.
I’d gone from being a respected doctor, in a small and forgotten town in Europe,
to a jobless nobody with foggy perspectives, but at least I was in the biggest
city.
I was
overwhelmed by bouts of depression and by questions without answers. Had I made
the right choice? Would I make it? To which world did I belong? Who was I and
who would I become? I hung between two worlds, scared but determined to face
anything just to end up in this part of the world, which I imagined to be
powerful and generous, a place where I could fulfill my dreams, although at the
moment, they seemed unattainable. Whenever I heard the word home, I hesitated.
At home in Romania
or at home in the apartment of some friends who housed me temporarily? My birth
was postponed every day.
My first day in New York. A generous friend took me on a motorcycle
tour of Manhattan. It was April 1990 and it was hot. My friend gave me a helmet,
I put it on, and we were off. My heart dropped to my belly. I had been waiting
for this moment for such a long time…We drove through Queens,
crossed Queensborough Bridge, snaking dangerously among the cars stuck in
traffic. The East River and Roosevelt Island stretched underneath us, drowned in
the spring sun, and Manhattan rose in front of us with its forest of skyscrapers.
We headed
south on 5th
Avenue
and my friend told me:
“Don’t
bother with the traffic. I’ll take care of that. Just look up. That’s where
everything happens.”
I
followed his advice for over an hour. I held my head back, contemplating from
bottom up the skyscrapers that seemed to crumble on top of me. I felt like a
sick man on a stretcher, wandering through the city in an odd ambulance. Finally,
we reached the intersection of Broadway, and drove all the way downtown. I
caught a glimpse of a miniature Statue of Liberty, somewhere in the distance,
and looking at it was the only moment when I relaxed my stiff neck. I thought
about the tourists who complained of pains in the neck after staring at the
Sistine Chapel in Rome,
which I still hadn’t seen.
We drove
back toward Central
Park,
and we stopped somewhere by the Plaza Hotel, where I had a meeting. I tried to
pull my helmet off but I couldn’t. My head had swelled beyond recognition. My
friend and I were both pulling at it but couldn’t shift it. I felt that everyone
was looking at us, and I was happy that the plastic shield covered my eyes. I
was embarrassed, but nobody really paid attention to me.
In New
York you can’t shock no matter what you do. After we both tugged at it for a
while, I managed to pull the helmet off, almost dislocating my nose and ears. I
gathered a few amused looks from passers-by, which was remarkable for my first
day in Manhattan.
The
person I was supposed to meet was late. I watched the people around me carefully.
I scrutinized the street greedily, as if trying to record everything. I didn’t
miss the white sports car, a Camaro parked across the street. Two men with dark
shades followed me with their eyes, tense and suspicious. One of them got out of
the car and came toward me. He held a cigarette and asked me:
“Do you
have a light, man?”
For me
light meant just that, light. I wasn’t aware of its double meaning: fire and
light. Searching for words, I answered that I didn’t smoke. He laughed, suddenly
relaxed, and asked me where I came from. He also told me, over his shoulder:
“Be
careful, man, you look like an undercover cop.”
That was who I was. A Caucasian man who looked like a disguised cop and had a
swelled head on top of it.
Queens, where I lived back then, was a completely different New
York. There, everything happened down on the pavement, close to the ground.
Without skyscrapers, without the glamorous clamor of the streets during lunch
break, without anything spectacular. After my first walk down on Steinway
Boulevard
in Astoria,
I had the abrupt sensation of an immense improvisation.
Compared
to Europe,
even to Eastern
Europe,
everything here seemed temporary, accomplished in haste by people thrown
together, a neighborhood of plastic and cardboard, an impersonal annex of
opulent Manhattan. People had decent, content looks on their faces, like
resolute people who, in case the business didn’t go well, would dismantle and
repack everything, including their homes, and move elsewhere. Like an itinerant
circus. It took some time before I understood that, for them, this was the end
of the road, as it would be for me. Unless, of course, we wanted to go back
where we came from, which was now possible, and a option. I couldn’t imagine
where we could go on from here. This was the “promised land”, our final
destination.
Every
night I dreamed of Brasov,
with its medieval houses, its mortar and layers of history peeling off, its ski
resort packed with snow, through which my shadow performed a slalom that left no
trace. Over a year passed before my dreams included events linked with the new
life I had in America.
None of my daily activities or thoughts seemed important to my oneiric memory,
which searched out of inertia through my abandoned life, which had been walled
in with my own hand. In the morning, old smells woke me up, titillating my
nostrils, and my troubled senses. Everything around me seemed foreign, and I
rested for a while on the edge of the bed, reminding myself who I was, what I
was doing here, what I had to do that day, the day after, and every day. This
was my morning exercise.
My daily
dreams diluted every day. But some of them came true very fast. Like devouring
bananas. I ate nothing else for a whole week, shocking my host family. Thus I
freed my frustration, accumulated during communist years, when bananas were
imported only once or twice a year. After hours of waiting in line, I would get
only two kilograms, the maximum allowed per person, and I would keep them for my
young daughter. I only bit furtively at the bottom of the banana.
Following
that week’s diet of bananas, I couldn’t stand them anymore.
UP