Tsura: A World War II Romance

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  The next evening after dinner—a long torturous affair where Mihai refused to say anything other than the politest inanities about the weather or to complement the meal, a joke if there ever was one since the mămăligă, a corn porridge, was burnt on the bottom and soggy in the middle—Tsura finally sat down her fork with a clang against the bowl.

  “I think it’s time for our evening walk.” She had spent the day pacing, waiting for Mihai to get home. And now here it was. She’d finally get the answers to her many questions. She’d choked down a few bites of mămăligă, but Mihai had seemed to linger over his meal. At last, he finally cleared his bowl.

  Tsura sprang to her feet, gathering up both bowls in the same motion and dropping them in the sink. The next second, she was over by the door to grab their shoes. She brought Mihai’s to him where he was still sitting at the table.

  “I don’t know why we didn’t think of going on walks before this,” Tsura said loudly, slipping on her shoes while she stood, hopping on one foot to slide each on. “All the fashionable people used to stroll Calea Victoriei every night.”

  “It was too hot for my taste before now,” Mihai replied, frowning and examining the perfect bow tie on his shoe before pulling the string and then re-tying it. Tsura sighed and prayed for patience as she pulled her new ID booklet out of the drawer of the bed stand and slipped it into her brassiere.

  Luckily, it only took Mihai one more try before the bow tie on his shoe was to his standard of perfection and he was rising to leave. He locked the door behind them.

  As soon as they stepped out into the open air, Tsura breathed in deep. Finally she was out of that apartment. It was the first time since she’d arrived almost a month ago in the dead of night, that horrific day following her horrific wedding. She supposed she could’ve gone out earlier in the day since she’d gotten the papers last night. Maybe something as simple as trying to find a nearby breadstand, but she’d found herself oddly reticent to go out on her own. Afraid even. What if someone stopped her? Questioned her? It had been so long. She knew she’d have to leave the protection of the apartment and go outside eventually, she’d just rather her first time be with Mihai and the broad-shouldered shield his presence offered. She hadn’t forgotten the strength of the muscled back she’d seen the night before.

  And now here she was. Outside. Finally. It was a sunny day after yesterday’s rain, and the rain seemed to have left behind cooler winds than the stifling summer heat she’d suffered for all of August. It felt wonderful against her skin. She wanted to laugh and dance.

  Mihai held out an arm to her. He leaned over to whisper. “You never know who’s watching.”

  She nodded, her joy at being under the great blue sky tempered. “Let’s go, then,” she said. They headed down the wide, busy boulevard. Even at seven o’clock, there were plenty of people walking the sidewalks. The street had a mixture of bicycles flying by, motorbikes, the rare car, and the double-car gold-painted trams that passed every quarter hour. Tsura couldn’t take her eyes off all of the activity. It was so much more fascinating up close than from the distance of her window.

  The air was fresher than the apartment but still stank of city. This was the nicer part of town, but it was also the center of the spider web that made up Bucharest. For miles around stood tall buildings packed with people. Tsura could smell the open market a few blocks away, the distinctive smell of dirty chicken feathers and butchered meat left too long in the sun. The streets themselves were dirtier than they’d been during peacetime. Fumes from the factories added to the smell that all combined to create the particular aroma Tsura associated with city.

  Still, she wanted to throw back her head to feel the sun on her face and breathe and breathe and breathe. It was more than an hour to sunset and its rays were still warm on her skin. This was what her soul had been longing for. Light and open air and the ever-loving sky above her. She wanted to know Mihai’s secrets, but maybe she had wanted this even more.

  After about ten minutes, they crossed the Boulevard and turned onto another street for only another couple blocks, and then they were at the Palace Square. Tsura glanced across the square at the large gleaming statue of King Carol I and behind it, the Royal Palace itself. It was a beautiful, imposing building of gleaming white stone. Somehow, in all the attacks on Bucharest, it had escaped being bombed. It was just what a Palace ought to look like, she’d always thought.

  They walked past and Tsura glanced wistfully down Calea Victoriei as they crossed it. The oldest street in Bucharest, Calea Victoriei boasted the most beautiful architecture in the city, all done in the Parisian style. People called Bucharest Little Paris. Everyone who was anyone used to go for evening walks down the famous street each night, stopping at the many shops and cafes that stayed open late to serve such patrons. Tonight, there was barely any foot traffic on the street. The end of an era, she supposed. After this war, maybe no one would be so carefree again.

  Tsura turned her attention back to Mihai after they had passed.

  “Can we talk yet?” she murmured under her breath to Mihai.

  “Once we’re in Cișmigiu,” Mihai said. She nodded. It was a good place to talk without being overheard. They were both silent as they walked the next few blocks.

  Once Cișmigiu Garden had been a glorious park, the green jewel at the heart of Bucharest with a picturesque lake at its center. Now peasants, Roma, and refugees had made a flimsy camp there, occasionally cleaned out by the police only to make their way back the next week. It was still early enough in the night though—those that slept in the park often didn’t come until long past nightfall—and anyone with an ounce of sense would leave Mihai alone because of his intimidating size.

  They entered the park, and in spite of the old newspapers that were little more than pulp crusted along with other trash, leaves, and other debris against the edges of the path, Tsura was still enchanted by all the greenery. So many trees. And grass and bushes and even flowers, though they were only yellow wildflower weeds that sprouted in the overgrown lawns. During peacetime this park was a well-maintained garden. Tsura liked the wild version better. They passed by a peasant woman bathing her three children in the dirty lake water. Or at least attempting to. The oldest apparently thought it was a great game to avoid the sliver of lye soap and swim out towards the center of the lake.

  Tsura continued to watch the drama as they passed over a bridge crossing a narrow portion of the lake. The woman shouted at the boy to come back before the police came and sent them all away. That threat did nothing to sway him. It was only when she mentioned she’d tell his father that he reluctantly turned back and headed toward shore.

  Mihai and Tsura continued walking until they could no longer hear voices, tracing the lake’s edge and finally settling on a secluded bench underneath willow trees whose branches bowed over to touch the water’s surface.

  They were finally alone.

  “I was right, wasn’t I?” Tsura asked quietly. “You’re a,” she glanced around. She didn’t see anyone, but it was always best to be careful about the exact words one used. Obviously they’d be speaking secrets tonight, but she couldn’t bring herself to say the word spy out loud again. Bad luck to say it too many times, surely. “You work in the shadows?”

  His face was impassive. “It’s safer for everyone if you didn’t know,” he said briskly, “but I should have known Luca’s sister would guess it sooner or later.”

  She knew it! Then she pursed her lips. She didn’t care his reasons, he should have just told her from the start. “And these shadows, who do you work for? How long? Since the beginning of the war?”

  He lowered his voice even further. “I work for Iuliu Maniu and the British.”

  Tsura blinked in surprise. Maniu? “The leader of the National Peasant Party?” It was the biggest political party in the nation. Everyone in the country loved Maniu.

  Mihai nodded.

  “Ah ha,” she breathed, sagging back on
the bench. “Luca always admired him. Even though Maniu supported General Antonescu in the beginning. And now he’s working against him? With the British?”

  “He never supported Antonescu allying with the Germans or anti-Semitism. He’s repeatedly petitioned to shut down the camps in Transnistria. Maniu still supports Antonescu even while he works against him. He’s always seen the good in the man.”

  Tsura sputtered, “The good? He’s a murderer!”

  Mihai nodded, looking out at the large pond. “For the camps, Antonescu deserves the death sentence. But he could have been a good man. He cleaned out the corruption after King Carol. And he’s saved a lot more Jews than he’s killed.”

  “What could you possibly mean?” Tsura almost rose up off the bench. “You were here for the pogroms in Bucharest. You saw all the Jews that were killed, hung up in the butcher’s shops like meat. You know about what happened in Iași. And the camps—”

  “He only deported the Jews in northern Romania to the camps, and any who’ve been arrested.”

  “Unjustly arrested,” Tsura broke in. “Like Luca.”

  He nodded again, giving her the point. “But the Germans pressure him constantly to deport all the rest to a Polish concentration camp called Auschwitz. That’s what happened to all the Jews in Transylvania when it was annexed to Hungary. The Germans think they should be able to take the rest of the Romanian Jews there too. Antonescu refuses. His stubbornness has saved millions of lives.”

  Tsura scoffed. “And all the people who have died? What happened to Luca? Am I supposed to praise Antonescu for those things?”

  “No.” Mihai moved closer on the bench so that they were only inches apart now. “But you aren’t listening. A weaker ruler would’ve buckled to Germany. They wouldn’t have kept us sovereign this long. Or stood against the Iron Guard when they rebelled in ’41. Imagine a country ruled by the Iron Guard for a moment.”

  Tsura did, and swallowed hard.

  Mihai continued. “And this Auschwitz concentration camp isn’t like Transnistria. They aren’t just corralling the Jews and Roma together. They’re exterminating them.” Mihai reached out and curved one hand around her ear and the back of her neck, forcing her to look him in the eye. His face was so intense in the setting sun. How had she ever believed this man indifferent to life?

  “In Auschwitz, they drive them like pigs into a chamber. A gas is vented out until they are all dead—men, women, and children. And then they burn their bodies in huge ovens until they are ash. They say the smoke fills the skies for miles and miles.”

  Tsura felt she should cry, but the horror of it choked the tears in their ducts. She had literally never before imagined anything as monstrous or inhumanly evil as he had just described. She could only make odd strangled gasping noises, not able to look away from Mihai.

  His voice softened but his grip did not. “And that’s why I thank God every day that it’s a strong, arrogant, incorruptible man like Ion Antonescu who is running our country, because he won’t let that, at least, happen here. Nor will he let the Germans deport the rest of the Jews and your people.”

  He let go of her neck and moved back. She could smell the sweet wine on his breath that he’d had with dinner. “But times are changing.” His gaze finally turned away from her. “Antonescu’s time is coming to an end.”

  Tsura blinked. She finally managed to swallow, but she felt light-headed. She was glad she was sitting. Images of things she’d never seen but could imagine colored her vision. A roomful of people screaming and helpless as gas filled the space. Helpless to escape as they all slumped to the floor. Knowing they were going to die. Watching their children… Then piles of bodies being fed into an oven…

  Tsura grabbed her stomach and squeezed her eyes shut. When she looked up, she found Mihai’s multi-faceted gray eyes back on her. He was such a large man, but she’d thought him impotent and cowardly before. All bulk and no consequence. Easily discarded from her thoughts. Now his shoulders seemed broader, as if his body took up more space.

  “Is that why you do what you do?” As she watched, the last of the sun dipped beyond the horizon and the reflected silver quality was gone from his irises.

  He laughed harshly, grating after the gentleness of only moments before. “No. No, girl. That’s not the kind of man that I am.” Mihai angled his body to one end of the bench and looked outward, his face a blunt, silhouetted profile in the twilight.

  She frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “Never make the mistake of thinking I am a good man. I was a coward. You’re fond of stories, yes? Luca always said so. So I’ll tell you a story.”

  His elbow was on the armrest of the bench in apparent relaxation but his suit coat didn’t touch the wooden back. There was a tension strung tight through his limbs like he was a caged animal not quite at rest. Tsura said nothing. She only watched him, the way you didn’t take your eyes off of a wounded dog. It was hurt, yes, but it might also strike out at any moment. She scooted the last few inches to the opposite end of the bench.

  “When I left Paris in ’38, I knew what the Germans were. What Hitler was.” Mihai’s voice was back to its usual monotone. Only Tsura, so familiar with dual faces herself, began to wonder if it was the mere projection of indifference. “War was coming. It was one reason I came home. But mainly I came because my father said he needed me. Needed me. That was how he put it.” The monotone had slipped, turning bitter. “Suddenly my ‘foolish interest’ in studying languages had become a useful skill.”

  For a man of usually so few words, tonight he was a fountain. His mouth turned down, as if there was a sour taste on his tongue. “He was inundated with foreign oil contracts. He needed me by his side. And so I went. For awhile, I was the son he always wanted. Which of course, was what I had always wanted.”

  Mihai swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down. “I only realized after I got home that by foreign contracts, he really meant German contracts. There were a few British contracts in the beginning, but when the war began and Romania joined the Axis, only the German contracts continued.”

  For a time there was only silence. Perhaps a more forgiving person, considering all Mihai had done for Tsura, wouldn’t make Mihai say anything further. But for better or worse, Tsura wasn’t that person. “And how long did you keep helping the Germans get oil for their war?”

  Mihai looked over at her and his lips quirked up in that almost-smile of his. “You understand.” He nodded. “I’m glad. I would’ve been disappointed if you absolved me of my sins so easily.”

  She frowned at that, but he continued again. “I worked at father’s refinery negotiating German contracts until the end of 1941, when I came for a brief visit to Bucharest.”

  She knew the time he meant. “After Luca lost his leg at Odessa.”

  He nodded. “Until then, I only let myself think of Germany as Romania’s military ally, you see. The way the papers told it. That way I could reconcile what we were doing—the oil we sold to the Germans helped Romania push Russia back and regain the land they stole at the start of the war.”

  “But Germany had also taken Transylvania from us and given it to Hungary,” Tsura interrupted.

  “Yes!” Mihai nodded, a cruel smile on his face, though Tsura had the feeling the cruelty was aimed toward himself. “It was an idiotic lie I told myself because I was a cowardly little boy who wanted his father’s approval.” He looked up at Tsura, his jaw tensed. “Except I wasn’t a child, was I? I was a man. As accountable for my sins as Antonescu is for his.

  “It was Luca who made me see it. He told me things, after you had gone to bed each night. They were things that could only be spoken of in the dark.” Mihai looked at the ground for a long moment, elbows on his knees, hands clasped. On anyone else, it would look like a position of prayer.

  “What things?” Tsura felt a mix of emotions. Why had Luca been willing to confide things to Mihai but not to her? But still, God, she just wanted to hear anything that came fr
om Luca’s mouth. Anything that had been in his heart. For a brief moment, she imagined Luca in one of those rooms Mihai had spoken of, with the gas filtering in and all the screams. But no, no, Luca was in a Romanian camp, not a German one. He was still out there, waiting for her to find him, waiting… please, please, be alive and strong for me, Luca.

  Mihai continued looking at the ground. Night had fallen around them but the moon was a quarter-full and her eyes had adjusted with the dimming light. Still, it was only enough to make out the shadowed features of his face. Not that she could tell anything of the emotions of the man within as he spoke with practiced detachment.

  “Luca told me what the army, both Romanian and German soldiers, had done to the Jews in Basarabia on their way to Odessa. It was slaughter. Entire Jewish villages gunned down. He did what he could to try to help in small ways, sneaking a few Jewish families in Transnistria extra bread here and there as the Army passed through. But he was just one foot soldier. He didn’t participate when factions of the army joined the German death squads. Instead he was forced to help dig mass graves.”

  The same choking sense of being unable to breathe from before came back. All those people lost. So violently. Tsura pressed her hands against her ribcage and then her chest, both to try to catch her breath and because it hurt that these evil things she’d known in the back of her mind existed—she was linked to them now. Their blood had been spilled in her country—or at least the soil her vitsa had traveled the last two hundred years—and witnessed by the other half of her soul. Luca had buried them. But their souls were not at rest, couldn’t be at peace after such a death and unholy burial. She was sure her brother had wept for them at least, or maybe, after seeing so much horror, he’d had no more tears. She understood, now, the lifeless shell that had been her brother when he returned from the war.

  “Luca told me he was glad his leg was blown off at the start of Odessa.” Mihai’s voice had gentled. At least about Luca, he could not be detached. Tsura looked up at him, startled to feel the night breeze cooling tear tracks on her face. Finally, she was crying.

  “Luca couldn’t bear seeing what would happen to the Jews after the army took the city,” Mihai went on. “He didn’t intentionally put himself in the path of the Russian tank when it was firing mortar rounds—it came on his unit while German support was en route, but he wasn’t sorry. He knew it would be another massacre. From the accounts I’ve read at the German ambassador’s office, it was.”

  Tsura was silent, one hand still pressed to her chest even though her breathing had evened out. Tsura had been the one to put the pieces of Luca back together when he’d come back from the war, but she’d never known for sure until now what it was that had broken him.

  “He would never talk to me about his time in the army. I only knew he was so different when he got back.” Luca, who had once loved to dance and play music, being sent to watch thousands slaughtered. Forced to dig their graves. Her hand turned to a fist against her sternum.

  There was a sad tilt to the left side of his lips. “He wanted to protect you from all of it. He said his Tsurica’d had too much darkness already.”

  “Oh Luca.” Tsura bent over at the waist until her chest touched her knees. Her stupid, over-protective brother. She could imagine him saying that, whispering those words to Mihai back in the months when he was still recovering. Mihai was over every day in the beginning.

  Tsura sat slowly back up. “So that was when you decided to become,” she looked around them furtively, then gestured with her hand, “to get involved.”

  Mihai nodded. “Luca told me about the camps that were being set up in Transnistria and the Jews and Roma being sent there. He said we had to help them.” Mihai smiled, that tiny quirk of his lips. “He got mad at me for working with the Germans. Told me I was blind and stupid. It was the same thing he’d told me the day he dragged me out of the ocean when we were ten. He was right both times.”

  Tsura smiled faintly. “He always did love telling people when they were being stupid. Of course, so do I.”

  Mihai inclined his head. “It’s a family trait.”

  Tsura laughed, though inside it was a half-wail. Luca, she wanted to shout. Luca, where are you now? Are you still breathing? Is your heart still beating in your chest?

  She reached down and plucked the stem of a long weed. She inhaled the scent of the fresh grass, breathing deeply. Oh God, it smelled so right. Of deep earth and green things grown under the good yellow sun. Then she looked up at the stars. Her Grandfather Besnik’s voice rumbled in her ear. Roma are like the stars… A star cannot shine alone, you see. It would blink out and go cold.

  “So what then?” she asked, forcing herself back to the moment.

  “So I began to atone.” Mihai stopped, the bleakness of that last word hanging in the night air. There was something to the way he said it. It wasn’t a word he’d come up with in the moment. This was something he’d thought about before, long and deep. Tsura reached out a hand, but he flinched before she could even touch him. She pulled back.

  When he continued, the monotone was back. Tsura didn’t know how she knew, but she felt sure the timelessness was meant to cover that word that kept echoing beneath all the rest: atone, atone, atone. “It wasn’t hard to get work at the Embassy through connections with officials I’d met working with Father. They’d known me for years, and they needed reliable translators in Bucharest. I was a logical choice.”

  “And what do you do?” She cocked her head sideways, as if a different angle might reveal more of his secrets. “As in, actually do for Maniu?”

  He shrugged. “Not much. Document copying. Transcripts of the boring meetings at which I translate. I put up a plant in my window to notify them I have items for a drop, I put documents in an agreed location, others pick them up.”

  Tsura’s eyes widened, finally understanding the significance of the plant and why he’d been so agitated when she kept moving it.

  Mihai continued. “When Luca and I came up with this scheme, I think we imagined far grander situations of espionage and heroics. But what I am is an office man.” He held up his hands, that mocking smirk back on his mouth. “Other men carry guns and I carry a briefcase. I might have found the coward’s way through this war yet, just easier to sleep at night this way.”

  Tsura ignored him. “And how did you get in contact with…” She broke off, not knowing the right word. “The Resistance?”

  Mihai continued smirking, as if he was fully committed to being unpleasant now. When he looked at her, he did so condescendingly. “There is no Resistance, not here in Romania. There’s Maniu and a few fellows with a transmitter who can occasionally get a message to the Brits in Cairo.

  “The closest we get to anything organized is through the wealthy Jews who’ve tried to keep what’s happened in the rest of Europe from happening in Romania. They pay millions and millions of lei to keep their families and fellow Jews out of the camps and labor gangs. All their businesses have been stolen by the state, but most have kept their lives. As long as they had the good fortune to be born south of Basarabia and east of Transylvania. The best resistance in Romania is the monetary kind.” He nodded, rubbing his chin. “These are good years to be a rich Jew. Money means life. Of course,” he shrugged, “the Roma can never tell one gagiu from another, so they don’t know which to bribe, now do they?”

  His voice was cynical and ugly and Tsura hated it even though she understood it was the world that was cynical and ugly. But why did Mihai have to say things this way? Was he trying to make her hate him?

  She glared at him and he glared back, as if he was sure he’d make her flinch away first. He thought he was so menacing. He thought he was so intimidating. He usually did it by being hulking and silent. Now he was doing it by being confrontational and mean. For some reason, he needed distance between himself and the people around him. Maybe living in the same apartment, sleeping in the same room with her each night was making him as uncomfortable as it w
as her.

  It was the forced intimacy of shared space that made someone become family, even when you didn’t like them, like with the Weinbergs back in Domnul Popescu’s basement, even before Andrei had come. She’d felt herself succumbing to it with Mihai even when she wanted to hate him. Mihai had felt it for her brother, but for some reason didn’t want to let himself feel it for her. It was a sense of family. Vitsa. That was what vitsa meant. Clan or family. No, not everyone in the caravan was related to you, but they became your family because you traveled together. For this moment and time, for however many months, she and Mihai were traveling together.

  She was learning far more tonight than about the swaying tides of nations, the atrocities men could perpetuate against one another, or even what Mihai’s shadow work was. She wanted to stand on the bench and scream at him, I see you, Mihai Popescu, I SEE you! He was a man so uncomfortable with even temporary intimacy that he had to shove it away as if it was a snake.

  She cocked her head to the side, a mocking smile of her own now on her lips. “So how’s the atonement coming along? I suppose I’m atonement too? That’s why you’re helping me?”

  He nodded his head decisively. “Yes.”

  “Liar,” she said calmly.

  That caught Mihai off guard. “What?”

  “You’re a liar. This isn’t about some kind of righteous atonement. You haven’t invited anyone else to live in your apartment. You like me.” Tsura poked him hard in the chest. “Admit it. That’s why you’re helping me.”

  Mihai’s eyes widened in alarm. He really was afraid of being tied to anyone, even by the thinnest rope of friendship. Tsura wanted to laugh it was so sad.

  Instead, she swiped at the drying tears on her cheeks and stood up. She threw her arms out and tipped her head back, breathing in the night air deeply. The drooping willow branches brushed her arms and she swayed back and forth to feel the gentle swish as they slid across her skin.

  Tsura breathed in again, the fresh scent of the green leaves mixed with the pulpy, rotted scent from the lake. New life and old, together in a single breath. She closed her eyes and let a small smile ghost her lips. She knew what she must do. And there could be no more tears in the meantime.

  “It’s all right, really.” She opened her eyes and looked back at Mihai. “I’m very likable. I understand. Though I have been a bit of a hag toward you, haven’t I?” She cocked one eyebrow. “But you still like me and want to help me. Well, it’s probably mostly because you love Luca, but you probably like me a little bit.” She held her forefinger and thumb about five centimeters apart.

  “And that, Mihai Popescu, is because you are a good man. Underneath all the growly bits and the sarcastic bits and Lord,” she threw both hands up in the air, “let’s not forget the dour, silent man routine, shall we? No, can’t forget that, that’s your favorite! And all of that, dear Mihai, and because of Luca who is your brother and mine, I am declaring myself your Honorary Sister, capital letters, official title and all.”

  Mihai looked a bit stunned throughout this entire revelation and Tsura felt not a little satisfaction at having struck him speechless. She leaned over the bench and wound her arm through his, tugging him to his feet. She could never have brought him to his feet on her own, but he acquiesced and stood, though, as always seemed to happen, he stiffened at her touch. Still, he didn’t pull away and walked with her arm in arm away from the lake’s edge, back toward the path.

  They weren’t yet to the bridge and there wasn’t anyone nearby. “Now, am I to assume,” Tsura leaned up and whispered near his ear, “that Luca was in on these shadow games with you?”

  Mihai tensed even further. “It’s not a game,” he snapped.

  This time Tsura did sigh out loud. “I know that, Mihai.” Didn’t he understand her at all by now? “But I also know Luca wouldn’t have urged you to help and then done nothing himself.”

  There was a long beat of silence. “He used his mathematics degree and had that apprenticeship at the bank.” Mihai was careful to keep his voice low even though there wasn’t anyone close as they walked around the perimeter of the lake.

  Tsura nodded. Luca had been so proud of that job, even though he’d only been a starting accountant.

  Mihai was silent another long moment as they passed another couple walking arm in arm. He waited until they were well out of listening range. “He could be quite creative with his accounting. Faking ledgers, hiding money, sometimes getting money out of the country for Jewish friends before it was lost.” His mouth twitched. “Then there were the lists. Endless lists mapping which officials could be ‘trusted’ for what amount and wouldn’t sell you out, how much it took to keep someone out of the labor gangs, how much to keep on a business owner as unofficial manager, how much to keep from desecrating and rebuilding on top of a Jewish cemetery. He knew the ‘price’ for everything.”

  And Tsura started to laugh. Great belly laughs that made her stop on the path near one of the many statues that dotted the park. She put her hand out and rested it against the base of the statue to steady herself, she was laughing so hard.

  When she finally caught her breath, Mihai was looking at her as if he questioned her sanity, and again Tsura thought, this man really does not know me, does he?

  “It’s so funny, don’t you see?” She looked around but no one was coming. She leaned into him anyway and whispered. “All these very illegal things my brother was doing, lying and hiding all this Jewish money from the government, and what is he arrested and sent to Transnistria for? Some idiot police man walking near the market one day decides that his skin is too brown!”

  Tsura began to giggle again—there had been too many thoughts, too many images and emotions this night, and yes, she heard the hysterical notes to her laughter, but the time for dwelling on things was done. She was able to keep walking, which was all she really cared about for the moment. They made it back over the lake and then out of the park, but it was almost halfway back to the apartment before she could speak without laughing again. She took a deep breath as they finally turned on to Brătianu Boulevard. Time to let Mihai in on her plan.

  “Well, honorary brother,” she said, “it’s time your sister caught up with the tradition.”

  “What do you mean?” He’d taken her arm again after the incident at the statue and was all broad-shouldered stiffness beside her for the entire walk.

  She could hear the frown in his voice and smiled. “I’m joining the non-existent Resistance! I’m quite good with carving, so I think I can handle the stamps. And I’m sure with enough trial and error I can figure out what the chemicals are for. I made decent marks in chemistry.”

  “What are you talking about?” Mihai sounded both irritated and anxious.

  “You said there are no more good forgers left in town. It seems I have a bit of learning ahead of me, but my people are born artisans, and what is a forged document except a very specific type of art?” She paused in front of their apartment building and shook his hand vigorously. “Meet Bucharest’s next best forger.”

  Chapter 11