Bobcat and Other Stories Page 6

  ONE NIGHT, IN THE middle of the year 1985, I made the mistake of describing this technique to my fiancé, Rezvan Balescu, the Romanian liar. We had known each other for only two months at this point, but we were already engaged. We were standing on a small balcony outside our apartment. He was smoking, wearing pajamas under a down-filled jacket, and he was in the midst of one of his tirades on North America, which he loved and hated. “This place is so strange to me, so childish. You have so many problems that are not real, and you are so careful and serious about them. People discuss their feelings as if they were great works of art or literature that need to be analyzed and examined and passed on and on. In my country people love or they hate. They know that a human being is mysterious, and they live with that. The problems they have are real problems. If you do not eat, that’s a problem. If you have no leg, that’s a problem. If you are unhappy, that is not a problem to talk about.”

  “I think it is,” I said.

  “Exactly. That is because you are an American. For you, big things are small, and small things are big.” Rezvan was always making these large declarations about North Americans in a loud voice from our balcony.

  “I bet you one million in money,” Rezvan said as he blew out smoke, “that the number of hours Americans spend per week in these—what do you call them?—therapy offices is exactly the same number of hours Romanians spend in line for bread. And for what? Nothing. To make their problems bigger. They talk about them all day so at night they are even bigger.”

  “I don’t agree. The reason why people talk about their problems is to get over them, get rid of them. I went to a therapist once and he was very helpful.”

  “You?” He lifted an eyebrow, took a drag.

  “Yes, when I was eleven.”

  “Eleven? What could be the problem at eleven?”

  “I was just sad. My parents were getting divorced, and I guess I could tell that my dad was about to leave.”

  “But isn’t that the correct emotion—sadness—when a father leaves? Can a therapist do anything to bring your father home?”

  “No, but he gave me a way to deal with it.”

  “And what is that way? I would like to know.”

  “Well, just a way to separate from the situation.”

  “How do you separate from your own life?”

  “Well, you rise above it. You gain some objectivity and perspective.”

  “But is this proper? If you have a real problem, should you rise above it? When a father leaves a child, the child feels sad. This seems right to me. This rising above, that is the problem. In fact, that is the problem of America. I cannot tell my family back home that if they are hungry or cold, they should just rise above it. I cannot say, ‘Don’t worry, go to the movies, go shop, here is ten dollars in money, go buy some candy. Rise above your situation.’ ”

  “That’s not what I mean. I mean you literally rise above it. Your mind hovers over your body, and you understand the situation from a higher perspective.” I knew that if he pushed me far enough, this would end up sounding insane.

  “So this is what your man, your eleven-year-old therapist, teaches you: to separate your mind from your body, to become unhinged. This does not teach you to solve the problem; this teaches you to be a crazy person.”

  But already I was drifting up until I was watching us from the level of the roof. There she is, I thought, Margit Bergen, twenty-nine years old, in love with Rezvan of Romania, a defector who escaped political hardship to arrive in a refugee camp in Austria and a year later in Regina, Saskatchewan, where he now stands on a balcony in the moonlight, hassling her about America, as if she contained all of it inside her.

  I HAD MET REZVAN in my father’s lab at the university. Rezvan was a geologist, like my father. Technically, for grant reasons, he was a graduate student, but my father considered him a peer, because Rezvan had already worked for years as a geologist for the Romanian government.

  Originally he had been a supporter of Ceaus’escu. In fact, his father, Andrei, had been a friend of Ceaus’escu’s right up until the time Andrei died, in 1985. Rezvan, by his own account, stood by his father’s deathbed as he died and held his father’s hand, but both father and son refused to speak, because Rezvan had by then ceased to be loyal to Ceaus’escu.

  In the two years that Rezvan and I lived together, I would often rise from sleep to find him hunched over his desk, the arm of his lamp reaching over him. He wrote long letters into the night, some in English and some in Romanian. The English ones, he said, were to various government officials, asking for help in getting his family over to Canada. The ones in Romanian were to his family, an assortment of aunts and uncles and cousins. He wrote quickly, as in a fever, and if I crept up on him and touched his back, he would jump and turn over his letters immediately before looking up at me in astonishment. At the time, I thought this was simply an old habit of fear, left over from living for so long in a police state.

  Sometimes he said he could not forgive his country for keeping his family captive. He told what he called jokes—dark, labyrinthine stories that always ended with some cartoonish, undignified death for Ceaus’escu: his head in a toilet, his body flattened by a steamroller. Other times he spoke about his country with such longing—the wet mist of Transylvania, the dark tunnels beneath the streets of his town, the bookstores lined with propaganda that opened into small, dusty rooms in back filled with real books.

  In this same way Rezvan loved and hated America. He would rant about it from the balcony, but then we would return to our bed and sit side by side, our backs to the wall, and watch the local and then the national news, where almost every night somebody would criticize the prime minister, Brian Mulroney. Rezvan could never get over this: men appearing on television to insult their leader night after night and never getting pulled off the air. Sometimes we would turn to the news from the United States, which we received through a cable channel from Detroit. This was a real treat for Rezvan during the period of Reagan-bashing. “I love that man,” he said to me one night.

  “Reagan? You don’t like Reagan.”

  “I know, but look at him now.” They were showing a clip of Reagan waving. His face did look kind. His eyes were veering off, looking skyward. He looked like somebody’s benevolent, faintly crazy grandfather.

  “All day long people insult him and he doesn’t kill any of them.”

  Rezvan sometimes skipped work and came with me to the fields. He’d ride in the back of the truck, standing up, so that his head was above the cab, the wind pouring over him. He wanted to know all the details of my job. He became better than I was at some things. He could spot poor field drainage from far away. He loved to point out the signs of it—the mint, the rushes, the wiregrass, the willows.

  For lunch we stopped in the towns along the way at small, fragrant home-style diners. Almost all of them were run by Ukrainian women. Each one adored Rezvan. He would kiss their hands and speak in his strange accent—part British, part Romanian—and they would serve him free platefuls of food, one after another, hovering over him as if he were a long-lost son from the old country.

  One afternoon, while we were driving back to the city from a little town called Yellow Grass, I fell asleep at the wheel. I woke up after the crash to see Rezvan crumpled against the passenger door. I felt myself rising then, far above the car, far above even the tree line. From there I watched myself crawl out of the wreck and drag Rezvan out onto the grassy shoulder. And then, instead of watching my own body run down the long charcoal highway, I stayed above Rezvan. I watched the trees bow in the wind toward his body, listening for his heartbeat.

  Later that night, when I entered his hospital room for the first time, I expected him to refuse to speak to me. Rezvan smiled, though. “In my country,” he said, “you could work for Ceaus’escu. He has been trying to do this to me for years.” I started apologizing then, over and over. Rezvan just motioned me toward the bed and then put his arms around me. “It’s okay, it’
s okay,” he said. “Don’t cry. This is America. This is what is supposed to happen. I will sue you, and your insurance will give us money, and we will go on a trip. To California, a vacation. I am so happy.”

  I wiped my eyes and looked at him. His head was cocked to the side. A thin white bandage was wrapped around his forehead, and blood was still matted in the black curls of his hair. One side of his face was torn apart. His leg was suspended in a sling. Still, he looked at me incredulously, wondering how I could be crying when this was such a stroke of luck.

  For the next few months he had a cane, which he loved. He liked to point at things with it. The scars settled into faint but permanent tracks down the left side of his face. He liked that, too. We saw the movie Scarface over and over again. When he discarded the cane, he still walked with a slight limp, which gave his gait an easy rocking motion that seemed strangely to suit him. He never once blamed me; I don’t think it ever crossed his mind.

  REZVAN AND I STAYED engaged for two years. He seemed to think of engagement as an alternative to marriage rather than as a lead-up to it. I didn’t mind, actually. I just wanted to be with him. Life with Rezvan had a sort of gloss to it always. He passed quickly from emotion to emotion, from sadness to gratitude to arrogance, but he never fell into depression, ever.

  Perhaps because I was so happy with Rezvan, I did not notice what may have been obvious signs. But, oddly enough, the signs indicating that a man is in love with another woman are often similar to the signs of an immigrant in a new country, his heart torn in two. He wrote long letters home; he hesitated to talk about the future; during lonely nights he seemed to be murmuring as he fell asleep, but not to me.

  Nearly a year passed before I even noticed anything, or admitted to myself that I noticed anything. Then one day Rezvan received a phone call at four in the morning. I didn’t understand a word of it, since it was in Romanian, but in my half sleep I could hear him mutter the word rila again and again, sometimes insistently. And when he hung up, after about an hour and a half, he just sat there in the living room like a paralyzed man, the light slowly rising across his body. I asked him, “Rezvan, what does rila mean?” He told me that it meant “well lit,” as in a room.

  Two days later, as I walked up our driveway in my housecoat, the mail in my hand, I glanced through the letters and noticed a thick letter from Rilia Balescu. Rila was Rilia, a person, a relative. When I walked in the door, Rezvan was standing in his striped pajamas drinking coffee, smoking, scratching his head. As I handed him the letter, I tried to read his face, but saw nothing. So I said, “Who is Rilia?”

  “She is my sister, my baby sister. Gavrilia.”

  Does an extra beat pass before one tells a lie? This is what I had always believed, but Rezvan answered immediately. Perhaps he had been waiting for the question.

  “I didn’t know you had a sister.”

  “I don’t like to talk about her. We disowned each other long ago. She follows Ceaus’escu still; she has pictures of him and his son on her wall as if they were rock stars. I am trying to bring her over, but she is stubborn. She would rather go to the Black Sea and vacation with her boys than come here and live with me.”

  “So why have you never told me about her?”

  “Because it is not wise to speak aloud the one thing you want more than anything. You know that.”

  “No, I don’t know that.”

  “It’s true. Romanians have a word for it: ghinion. It means don’t speak aloud what you want most. Otherwise it will not happen. You must have a word for this in English?”

  “Jinx.”

  “Okay. I did not tell you about my sister because of jinx.”

  “Why did you tell me her name meant ‘well lit’?”

  “Pardon?”

  “The other day I asked you, and you said that ‘Rilia’ was the word for ‘well lit.’ ”

  “No, no. Rila is the word for ‘well lit.’ Rilia is my sister.” He smiled and kissed my face. “We will have to work on your accent.”

  Over the next month we settled into a routine. When Rezvan finished writing his letters in the night, he padded down the driveway, set the letters in the mailbox, and lifted the tiny, stiff red flag so that our mailman would stop in the morning. And then, after Rezvan was asleep, I would rise out of bed and go to the mailbox myself, pick out the ones to Rilia, and slip them into the pocket of my housecoat. I did the same thing with the letters she sent him. I collected those in the morning.

  At first it didn’t feel like a strategy. I was desperate to know if Rilia really was his sister or his wife—as if her handwriting would tell me. Rezvan left for work an hour before I did, and I opened the letters then. I sat on our bed, laying the pages in front of me, cross-referencing. Some of her passages were blacked out by censors. I found many names, but mostly two, Gheorghe and Florian, again and again. Gheorghe and Florian, Gheorghe and Florian, Gheorghe and Florian. I began to realize, very slowly, that these were probably their children.

  On one of these mornings my mother showed up at my door to drop off a skirt she had sewed for me. “Good,” she said, bustling in, “you’re home. I wanted to drop this off.” Already, as she said this, she was rapidly moving through the rooms of our apartment. My mother liked to do this, to catch me off guard and check all my rooms immediately for anything I might hide if given the time. “What is this?” she said, reaching the bedroom, where all the pages were strewn across the bed.

  “Oh, that’s just some stuff I’m reading for Rezvan. Proofreading.”

  She picked up a sheet. “Oh, so now you proofread in Romanian?”

  I smiled weakly. She didn’t pry, but for once I wished she would. What I wanted to do was tell her that this was my life spread across the bed, thin as paper, written in a language I could not understand, dotted with four names—Rezvan, Gavrilia, Gheorghe, Florian—but never my own. I wanted to ask her how she felt when my father was having an affair. And I wanted to ask what happened to the other woman. My father never married her, even after he and my mother split. Where had she drifted off to? Did she ever lose her breasts? Did she get well again? Was she happy somewhere now?

  I didn’t tell my mother anything, but when she left that day, she gestured toward the bedroom. “You know that you can find people at the university who will translate that for you.”

  I nodded and stared at my feet.

  “Maybe you don’t really need them translated? Maybe you already know what they say?” She ducked her face under, so that she could look at my face. “It’ll be okay,” she said, “either way.”

  I stockpiled the letters for two months. I didn’t intend to be malicious; I was just sitting on them until I could figure out what to do. Every night as I drove home from the fields, I thought, I will tell Rezvan tonight; I will say I know everything and I am leaving. But when dinner came, I could hardly speak. It was as if I were eleven all over again.

  Even Rezvan was getting depressed. He said that his letters were turning out to be all in vain. Perhaps, he said, he would quit writing them altogether. One night he said, “Nothing gets through those bastards. Perhaps I will never see Rilia again.” Then he limped to the sink, rocking back and forth, and filled his glass with water. He turned to me and said, “Why would they want to keep us apart, anyway?” His head was tilted to the side, and he looked like a child. He stared at me as if he really expected me to answer.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know about that stuff.”

  But of course I did. At the other end, across the ocean, men in uniforms were collecting letters and censoring them, blacking out whatever threatened them, and at this end I in my housecoat was doing the same thing.

  I tried to rise above the situation, but that strategy didn’t work at all. I was increasingly distressed at what I saw. I’d fly up and look down. There she is, I’d say, Margit Bergen of Saskatchewan. Who would have thought she’d grow up so crooked, crouched on her bed, obstructing love, hoarding it, tearing it apart with her ow
n hands.

  Until this point in my life I had always thought of myself as an open-minded person, able to step into another’s shoes. But I could not picture this Rilia. Her face, and the faces of her children, were blank for me. I hoped that this inability, or unwillingness, to imagine another’s face was not hatred, but I was deeply ashamed that it might be.

  Finally, one windy night in November, as I cut into a roast, I said, “Rezvan, is Rilia your wife?”

  “What do you know of Rilia? Has she called? Has she sent a letter?”

  “No, not at all. I was just wondering.”

  “Tell me what you know.”

  “I don’t know anything. I was just asking.”

  “Have you spoken to her on the phone?”

  “No, I have not.” I enunciated this very clearly. “Is she your wife, Rezvan?”

  “I am not a liar,” he said. “I will marry you to prove this. We will go to British Columbia and get married in the trees. Whenever you want. Tomorrow, if you like.”

  THE NEXT MORNING I put the letters in a bag and drove straight to the administrative offices at the university. A woman disappeared and reappeared with a list of professors who could translate Romanian for me. I had my choice of four. I glanced down the list and there, at number three, was Professor Roland Pine.

  I found him in the same office. He had aged well, his hair now ash instead of blond, a few extra lines across his face. When he stood up to greet me, I say that I had grown to be about half a foot taller than he was. His tic was still there, flashing across his face every fifteen seconds or so. As I shook his hand, I marveled that it had continued like this since the last time I’d seen him, keeping time as faithfully as a clock.