What films had some thick-fingered truck driver smuggled across West Germany, through Austria and Hungary, into Romania? We never knew when videos might arrive. Most illegal movies from the West were dubbed into Romanian by the same woman. No one knew her name, but more than twenty million people knew her voice. She brought us into a secret, forbidden world of inspiration.
“So, see you tonight?” Liliana asked that day at school.
“Yeah, meet you at nine,” I told her.
It was happening. Liliana Pavel was going to video night.
With me.
I arrived home from school and saw Mirel, a Roma boy in my building, standing on the sidewalk.
Roma families lived on the first floor, in ground-level apartments. Without moving his head, Mirel gestured with his eyes. I nodded to him, as if in greeting, but sending a private acknowledgment.
The Reporters.
The second floor and upper apartments had balconies, like ours. And on the balconies perched the “Reporters”—women who watched all comings and goings and chattered constantly.
I listened closely. One of the Reporters was gossiping. About me. Her voice carried from above.
“Quiet, but he speaks English, you know. Handsome if he’d comb his hair.”
I recognized her voice without looking—the woman with the drooping face. Unlike the other Reporters who wore stiff lines of age and exhaustion, this woman wasn’t old. Her baby had been born prematurely and died in a hospital incubator when Ceau?escu turned off the electricity one night. Within a matter of days, her young features drooped twenty years. Cici always wanted to help her. I wanted to write a poem about her. The woman with the fallen face.
The electricity was on when I arrived home, so I opted for the elevator to our fourth floor. The fickle elevator doors rattled shut, presenting a new display of communist poetry inscribed on the metal:
VIA?? DE RAHAT
Life is like shite.
I laughed. Most of the time it was. But not tonight.
My parents were still at work and Bunu was snoring in the kitchen. Cici was sitting at her sewing machine, creating a blouse from an old curtain.
“Starfish hopes you’ll be at video night,” I whispered. “I told him he’d have to ask you himself.”
“I can’t,” she replied over her shoulder. “I’m going to the Popescus’。 Their son has a suit that needs altering.”
Their son, he probably also had eyes for Cici. My twenty-year-old sister was tall and pretty, with long legs, black hair, and gray eyes like mine. People said we looked alike. To me, she resembled an exotic doll, the kind that’s collectible, not the kind that’s dragged around. Cici mended clothes for fellow workers and neighbors. She doted on the elderly people in our building and they adored her.
I did too.
Pretty girls like Cici generally had an attitude. They used their beauty as a strategy. But Cici didn’t. My sister was suspicious and watchful, but she was also fun and kind. She’d wedge into the kitchen with me, and together, we’d illegally listen to music I’d hotwired from Voice of America. She’d beg me to translate the song lyrics and then she’d whisper-sing all the wrong words. She had a hard time understanding English and it made me laugh. And when I laughed, Cici laughed.
And when Cici laughed—really laughed—it felt like the sun was singing. Blue sky, pure joy uncorked. I imagined that’s what freedom felt like. You wanted it to go on forever.
But today Cici wasn’t laughing. She sat motionless at her sewing machine and her shoulders began to tremble.
“Cici?”
She turned slowly to face me. Her eyes were rings of red, her cheeks stamped with splotches from crying.
“Cici, what—”
She quickly shook her head.
And put a finger to her lips.
10
ZECE
Cici, what’s wrong?” I whispered.
She raised a hand to stop me. She grabbed her pillow from the sofa and put it over the telephone. She then placed a book on top of the pillow.
Rumors claimed that Romanian telephones were all constructed with built-in listening devices. When whispering wasn’t enough, we put a pillow over the phone, just to be sure. We’d usually put the radio on as well, but ours was malfunctioning.
Cici sat back down. I pulled a chair from the table so she could whisper in my ear.
But she didn’t whisper. She looped her arms around my neck. And cried. What had upset her? She finally raised her face to mine, tears streaming down her cheeks.
“Oh, Pui,” she whispered.
Pui. Little chick. It was her nickname for me. I looked at my sister’s tear-streaked face and took a guess. “Examination at the factory?”