Too Great a Sky, page 11
Mother had also taken a sack of beans when they rounded us up, and after we were given water, she’d leave a couple drops at the bottom of the cup and put in a few beans, so that they’d expand a bit and we could eat them the next day when the beans were larger. All the children looked forward to Mother’s beans, because we shared them, especially with those who didn’t have any food left. We were capable of chewing on that bean for a whole hour! It was our favorite food, because we could nibble on it for such a long time. First of all, the bean was hard, it didn’t expand enough and had to be chewed a while, also, we knew that we wouldn’t receive anything else to eat any time soon, so we weren’t in a hurry. Everyone did the same thing, not just me. We’d compete to see who could take longest to eat the bean and the winner was the person who could stick out their tongue and still have bean on the tip of it while the rest of our beans had disappeared without a trace. First, we’d move it from one molar to another, happy we had something to eat, then we’d lightly suck on it, so we wouldn’t somehow swallow it by accident, then we’d separate the skin from the bean and we’d chew it for a long time, as if it weren’t the skin of only a single bean, but of at least ten. Then we’d divide the bean into two equal parts, because that’s its natural shape, two halves stuck together. Then you had to play with the two pieces for as long as possible, maybe while listening to a story, but being very careful not to crush them between your teeth. And when you decided that, enough, it was time to move on to the next stage, again you had to be very careful not to mash them at the same time, because otherwise you’d immediately swallow them and have nothing left in your mouth. You had to take them one at a time. After you swallowed the first part of the bean, you were overcome by a terrible sense of disappointment, because look how quickly it melted and you barely felt it, you barely tasted anything . . . So as not to be disappointed again, even worse, you delayed finishing off the bean for as long as possible. But that moment would come as well, then you’d roll your tongue around your mouth a couple seconds in search of the tiniest bit of bean, no matter how small, that might have been left in between your teeth randomly or through carelessness.
In Mother’s sack there were three kinds of longer beans, and one kind of short bean that was roundish and beady—crab’s eye. We ate all the crab’s eye beans first. The three longer kinds were big white ones, big black ones, and pink ones with lilac colored polka dots or splashes, which were the same size as the first two. I got to choose which bean I wanted first and each time I picked a different one, so I could try them all and see if they had a specific taste. But I couldn’t tell. So much time passed from one bean to the next that I always forgot the taste of the one I had eaten before. I think they tasted the same, but I liked the beans with the polka dots the most because they were the prettiest.
A prayer against hunger. Lord, make this word disappear from our thoughts, and with it the fatigue that it brings to the body. Lord, feed our spirits, our souls, so that it reaches even our swollen bellies. Illuminate and warm us. Pour Yourself into our souls, so that we will no longer think of food. Temper us, Lord, You, who knows our sins, see our hearts which are melting like wax and hear our sighs. Do not reject our prayers and laments, but receive with Your clean hands our tainted souls! Our souls are beaten down, Lord, by storms of doubts and worries. The consuming fire of all our sorrows terrifies our souls. Come, Thou clean and gentle light, and allay our consternation, bringing us Your peace, which we crave with such thirst. Place in our voices, Lord, the strength of faith, the perfume of love, the sweetness of hope, the power of goodness, and the comfort of patience, so that we can arrive safely at our ordained haven.
Bring us safely, Lord, to the end of this journey!
A journey as long as a lifetime. A lifetime is too short even, given how many lives it took away! A journey as long as all the lives of the Bucovinians who died and were thrown from the train, as long as those of everyone who later died of starvation, sickness, or from freezing throughout the entire expanse of the foreign steppes. And if you stop to think about it, a journey longer than the string of people thrown out along the entire length of the railroad. If we lined up the dead, one next to the other, it would reach farther than the end of the road and even the world. Lord, how vast is our Bucovina now, with its living and its dead! From one end of the earth to the other. The entire world belongs to us. To our dead.
Everything stopped. We got out. For good. Putting on its furry cuşmă hat of smoke, the train started the journey back, like a mare tossing its mane in the wind. For the first time, we could see the entire train, getting smaller and smaller, farther and farther away. The train melted away fairly quickly, as if it had never existed, but we still carried it within us, it rattled and jolted us inside and that’s how it was long after we got out of it. Actually, when I think about it, it jolts me even now . . . We were just a handful of people, those of us who got out . . . Maybe some people were still inside. Were only so few left from a train this long? Did that many people die on the journey?
After three and a half weeks of travel, we reached the end of the earth. I heard people around me moaning that, for us, this wasn’t just the end of the earth, but the end of the world. Forgive us, Lord, for we know not what we say! I thanked the Lord who had allowed us to get this far and touch this heavenly sky not just with our tortured souls, but also with our thin, withered fingers. Because of so much light, at first we couldn’t see a thing. We covered our eyes. After being in the train for so long, the sky appeared so suddenly, it was as if I had just been born and was seeing it for the first time. At the end of the earth, we were afraid of stepping too hard, we walked gingerly. You could fall from the earth, which ends here. And so we had taken the train to get to the heavenly skies. We climbed out into the sky, the train left, everything turned into heavenly air after the suffocating train, even the grass was made of air, and you could see the sky through it. Here I saw how round the earth is, like a mămăligă or a little watermelon.
Longer than all the roads and deeper than all the seas, more beautiful than all flowers, more precious than icons, heavier than cannons, brighter than candles and darker than cellars? The sky! I looked around for a stick, a hill, a pond, anything, a sign of something earthly or something human. But only the high heavens greeted us. Welcome! it said. And we held it up with our shoulders and our hands, so it wouldn’t crush us completely.
I was a little girl when I had gotten on the train and I climbed out a woman. At the end of the road, we received more bread than usual, they had us get off and the train went back, with a long whistle. Fedor, the soldier from our railcar, waved his hat at me, maybe not just at me, but at everyone. Maybe not at anyone in particular, but just because—from the joy of being done with his difficult mission. We watched the train until it disappeared past the horizon. Though it had been horrible in the train and the entire way we had wanted to reach our destination as quickly as possible, to get out, to breathe, finally, clean air, to have more space for our sweaty, unwashed bodies, when the train disappeared, we almost felt bad. The train kept getting smaller, all around us, just us and the sky, no human dwelling, no village or town, work camp or prison, kolkhoz or place to live, nothing . . . What we had around us, we later found out, was something called the steppe, an endless field, mirroring itself wherever you might look. The train was our connection to our previous, normal life, which we would later forget, but which now we still painfully remembered and missed. The train had come from our dear Bucovina, it connected us to the place where we had been born. I cried a bit, the weight of the sky was overwhelming, as if they had sent us here, at the end of the earth, the end of the road, to shoulder the sky, to hold it up so it wouldn’t collapse. We stood bent over, humbled by such majesty and the miracle of the change.
I was crying because we had arrived here and now it was my time to die. I could feel the blood draining from me. At first, I didn’t know what was leaking and then I touched it and saw that my hand was all bloody. It’s over, I’m dying. Many have died on the road, and now it’s my turn, I thought to myself. I felt the blood drain from my head, chest, fingers, pool into my belly, and trickle down from there, sticky, hot, unpleasant, onto my pants, which were already dirty. I cried. Mother was calm, or at least she tried to seem so, and attentive, she kept trying to cheer me up, to hug me, coddle me, trying to hide her own feelings and fear. “Cheer up so you don’t freeze, so you don’t catch cold. See how cold it is now, in the middle of the day, at night it will be even colder. Move around, walk a bit.”
“What good will it do if I’m dying?”
“Why are you dying?”
“I’m losing all my blood, whatever’s left of it, and I’m about to die.” Mother smiled sadly, to my confusion. I was dying and she was making light of it!
“So much sky and now your blood! Now it decides to come,” Mother mumbled, rummaging through our suitcase for a pillow-case, which she tore into strips and handed me one to put there. She told me that I wasn’t at all dying, but growing, my blood was changing itself out, filtering itself, and that I had to live, give her grandchildren, and return to sweet Bucovina. She also told me about girls and women, she hadn’t had time to tell me before, because, look, I had been a child and now I was entering the world of childbearing women. There was a lot I didn’t understand then, just that I wasn’t dying, not even close. Just so, how could I die when I still had a good crust of bread and some food hidden in our suitcase which could keep us alive for at least two more days, why was I in a hurry to die right now? Mother calmed me down and I looked around some more. That’s how I camped out in the middle of those heavens, a woman. Maybe from the joy of too great a sky.
Evening fell, our first evening on the steppe, under the great open sky. And as evening fell, a chill settled in as well, freezing our bones weakened by the journey and prolonged bumpy ride. We wrapped ourselves up in whatever we could find, but a violent shiver from the cold would still shake us from time to time. The Gherman sisters from our railcar, who I had become friends with on the train, came over with a few younger girls from their village.
Mother said we should move around, because otherwise we’d die of cold here before morning, we’d freeze.
I don’t know how it started, we gathered tightly together, we hugged, we began stamping our feet, humming a song, singing it with more feeling, louder, we began spinning around, improvising, in the end, a circle dance, a horă. Well, what do good Romanian girls do to keep from freezing? They start up a little horă! We were still young girls, we hadn’t come out yet at the village horă, but we had already been dreaming, before the deportation, about some handsome boy, maybe we secretly liked someone, we were preparing our festive blouses, which we were learning to embroider beautifully, we were waiting for the little boots in which, in two or three years, we’d steal the hearts of all the young men of the village. I was my mother and father’s youngest daughter, my older brothers who went to horăs would ask me to dance at home, meaning they practiced on me, so they wouldn’t embarrass themselves in the village. I liked dancing with them as well, I could hardly wait to grow up too. I knew all different kinds of horăs, some with more steps, some with smaller steps, some with more spins. The mothers looked at us lovingly and with a kind of cheerfulness. Other girls and young girls came up to our horă and would yell louder, above our song, and we’d unlink our arms and let them in. So our horă got bigger and our song grew stronger:
Come in closer, gather round! All together stamp the ground!
Left, right, left, and to the right, so our horă lasts the night!
I’ll keep dancing, I won’t stop, even if it makes me drop!
But these boots they aren’t my own, they were given to me on loan,
Da-da-da and da-da-dem, hope that I don’t ruin them!
My poor feet you’re getting weak from my dancing up a streak!
But you’ll have to stand the test, ‘cause I’m not about to rest!
When you dance the horă right, you’ll be dancing through the night!
That’s how Mother danced the tune when she had me in her womb!
The dancing and singing warmed us up, cheered us, and kept us from thinking black thoughts about what was to come. Then all the women who had survived (most of us were women), even the oldest ones, surrounded us and gathered their courage to join us in the horă. Including our Baba Tudoriţa, who was weak, bent over, she seemed barely able to move. She came over limping, bundled up in all her clothing. We unlinked arms to receive her in our bountiful horă, but she walked into the center and sang the horă calls to us, some of them happy, others less so.
If we knew before our birth, all the pain we’d feel on earth
We’d no longer take the breast, we’d go straight to heaven blessed!
Leaves of silver, leaves of gold, people say that I’ve grown old
Let them talk, what care have I? From my boots I make dust fly!
Meanwhile, all the mothers and housewives had joined us and were singing and doing fiery footwork, some became rosy-cheeked, others were smiling as if this were their first horă in Bucovina and they were unmarried women, with slender waists, without a care in the world. Where did all their vigor come from? They had been staggering when we got off the train! After she sang and called out for us, Tudoriţa began to dance amazingly too, the way she whirled around and all her different steps! We couldn’t stop marveling . . . She got warmed up and started taking off some of her clothes. She’d go up to some child who was more lightly dressed with a headscarf or blouse and put it over their shoulders or tie it around their waist, while the horă kept going. We were afraid she might fall, or feel sick, she had cast off all her clothes until she was wearing only a white underdress, with nothing under that. She danced a bit more, then she left the circle, she laid down on the cold grass and breathed her last. When we came over to her, we saw that she had died with a smile on her lips. What a beautiful death! We danced some more until we heard the whoops of the Kazakhs that had come to get us. They had heard our whistles in the distance and had answered back.
Then, in the horă, Jenea held me tightly and took me to the center to dance as boy and girl, he led as the boy and I said: “You lead so well! How nice it would be if you were a boy and protected me!”
“I will protect you,” Jenea said and kissed me on the cheek, blushing like a virgin. It wasn’t his first time blushing, he’d blush especially when I’d kiss him on the train thinking he was a girl. And me kissing him on the cheek as my best friend! I told him that I had grown up and my blood had come, “Did yours?”
“No,” he said, scared, and turned red again.
When they had come to round them up, they had asked if all the members of the family were present. His parents had said yes, hoping that their oldest son wouldn’t return right then, thankfully a neighbor had gone to his grandmother and had told her that the Ţarăs were getting taken away that moment. Grannie Anghelina hid Jeni, and then, later, when they were picked up together, she dressed him as a girl so they wouldn’t be separated. Jeni had been to the train station to search for his parents, he had a handbasket with things to eat. He saw them and gave them the handbasket from his grandmother. It’s wrong for children to see their parents humiliated, brought to their knees, it’s enough to make you cry, scream, but everyone was standing around as if nothing had happened. His father had been separated from the family, Jeni had seen this as well. His mother was left alone with three small children, only two reached the destination, the youngest had gotten sick on the train, he was just a few months old. The soldiers had counted, father, mother, three children, when his mother had, in fact, four, but the people with the lists hadn’t found out. Then the enemies came back and took his grandmother as well, not because she had been political or too rich, but because they needed her house, his grandmother was old, they also picked up the child and added the name to the list only when they were already inside the railcar. Then Grannie Anghelina said this was a granddaughter of hers, Jenica, who was visiting from a village in Romania. Jenica had on a coat of his grandmother’s and looked like a little girl, his hair was even long and curly, exactly how little girls wear it. I was really embarrassed when he told me that he was actually a boy. I realized that Mother knew, that maybe the entire railcar knew, I was the only one who rushed to kiss and hug him. It was easier for me to believe that Jenica was a girl, I didn’t know how to act around a boy, especially after all that had happened in the train. I was very embarrassed, it was my turn to blush.
And when I thought that this was the end, that we had finally arrived, that there was nothing beyond this, there was no going farther, fate was laughing at us. There is no end to life, dear child. When the people from the nearby kolkhozes came to pick us up in wagons, I saw them from a long way off, most of the wagons were driven by oxen, but a few of them by camels. There were no camels back home in Bucovina and I was seeing that animal for the first time then. An old woman crossed herself and said: “Holy Mother of God! Lord, good God! Look what the antichrists have done to the beautiful horses! What state will they bring us to? What will become of us?”
