Tsura: A World War II Romance

Tsura stared at the soggy mess of papers spread out on the platter in front of her and let out a huff of breath so strong that her unkempt hair wafted away from her face and then settled right back in front of her eyes. Mihai sat calmly at his desk across the room working on a translation of some kind or other. He didn’t even look up at her exasperated noise.

  Well, she was beyond exasperated. Exasperated had been a week ago when she’d been fighting with the strange chemicals to figure out which ones were meant to do what. Exasperated was when the experiment to see if adding heat to the substance called dimethylbenzene would help it become more sticky, mistakenly thinking it was meant to glue the pictures to the IDs. She’d barely come out of that one with her eyebrows intact.

  At least Mihai hadn’t been home to see it. That was the point at which she asked him if they could go visit the library together. She’d come home with several heavy tomes and learned that dimethylbenzene ironically had the opposite purpose of what she’d thought. It was a solvent, which meant it was used to clean sticky things. She’d moved beyond dismay to straight out bewilderment and quickly to frustration at that point. She didn’t need to clean anything, she needed to forge documents! She needed to put ink on paper! Another round of experimenting began.

  It was only by accident, another day and sleepless night later, that some of the dimethylbenzene, which was all over the dining room table at this point, had gotten on the newspaper Mihai had been reading. When she shifted the newspaper, she saw that the newsprint had transferred onto some stray papers underneath, even the pixels of the picture. It was an almost perfect replica. She’d stared, open mouthed as it hit her. The stamps. She scrambled for the stamps and then pulled out a separate envelope of papers she had never understood: they were papers with copies of official stamps from all over the country, Cernăuţi, Iași, Craiova, Constanța, Suceava, Galați. It made sense now. This was how Levi had transferred the images to the stamps to carve them.

  But that had been one victory against what felt like a mountain of difficulties. She’d figured out how to roll ink on the copper plate and press it to transfer the official looking image on the front of the paper that she’d fold as the outside of the booklet. Bulletin de Identitate, it proclaimed in ornate black lettering, with Romania written across the bottom. There were two copper plates. She had to be careful. For the IDs created before 1940, which was most of them, there was an additional emblem; under Bulletin de Identitate was the country’s old crest with the crown, and written at the bottom was, Kingdom of Romania.

  In Romania, IDs were rarely changed. A person could have the same identification booklet for twenty years. That’s what all the extra pages were for. If a person changed addresses or had a child, they simply went in to the local police station and the official there wrote in the change by hand and then stamped it to make it official. That was the extent of it. The pictures were only attached by glue and a staple in most cases. This made forgery of Romanian IDs easy and simultaneously complex.

  For example, the handwriting. At each stage of a person’s life when all these events occurred, another trip was required to the police station, at which point a different official would write in the information by hand. Having an artist’s eye, Tsura approached different styles of writing in the same way she did sketching. She studied Levi’s writing in the finished documents left in the knapsack. He wrote with slanted, looping letters. She practiced his scrawl for several hours, looking back and forth from his writing to her own until she felt like she had a feel for the way his hand moved when he wrote. It was eerie and sad to echo a dead man’s handwriting. The sentimental part of her wanted to think carrying on his work would make him happy. Then she squeezed her eyes shut hard and reminded herself she wasn’t sentimental. There was plenty of Mihai’s handwriting to look at for inspiration for a third style. His letters were precise little blocks. She hunched over stiffly in her chair while she copied out his small, tight script. She could learn more styles as she went.

  But again, this was only one more obstacle to overcome. All leading to her present dilemma. She’d practiced cutting the paper and binding together the booklets. Read: cutting in all the wrong sizes, wasting paper, printing the template upside down when she did cut them the right size, putting in the wrong number of pages, accidentally ripping the pages once she had put them in correctly, etc. She’d carved stamps. Read: she’d mis-carved stamps. She’d ruined several by cutting too sharply and slicing off a letter entirely and having to start over. This after several hours of working with the dimethylbenzene, figuring out that you couldn’t just put the chemical directly onto the image you wanted to transfer. No, you had to sponge it onto the back of the paper with the image and let it soak through slightly, otherwise it got all over the stamp and smudged everywhere. She’d been about to boil over and explode her top at that point.

  But she’d only breathed deeply and started again. She’d gone slower the next time. Painfully, achingly slow. She got a crick in her neck from staring so intently through the magnifying glass to make sure each cut was perfect.

  And she’d done it. She’d done it all. She’d begun making identification booklets start to finish. She had the stamps. She had the templates. She’d perfected the handwriting. She had the photographs and the names and information to fill in and the staples to put it all together. She had everything. Everything except for one slightly important element.

  She had run out of paper.

  Paper itself wasn’t such a rare commodity. It was the kind of paper that was the problem. In the knapsack, there had been all that nice aged-looking paper. There had appeared to be so much of it when she’d first pulled it from the bag.

  But when you took into consideration the fact that each ID took three pages (to fold into the half-sized six-paged booklet), that those three pages had to match in stock and color—and that she’d wasted more pages than she cared to consider with her experiments, faulty printing, and cutting—she’d only made eighteen booklets, when there were fifty-three names and pictures left on the list.

  And no more paper. Yesterday she had gone to the bookstore to look at art paper, but like the stores she’d always gone to growing up, the sketch pads were full of creamy, pristine paper. The paper in the office supply section was the same. When she asked the bookseller if he knew any place she could buy old paper, he had only looked at her strangely. She muttered an excuse about an art project and then turned and walked out quickly.

  Her next idea was that perhaps Levi had achieved the aged look by soaking the pages in tea or coffee. Which led to the soaking mess currently on the trays in front of her. It wasn’t a complete failure. A few of the pages she hadn’t completely waterlogged were drying and did look a little bit aged, but they were nothing like the natural feel of the pages in the knapsack. Those had simply been old.

  Tsura sat back in her chair and pressed her hands to her forehead, sweeping her hair out of her face. Where had he gotten his hands on all that old paper? There was something she was missing. She’d always bought her sketchbooks at bookstores. Maybe an art store would have a wider variety, but she doubted that would help. Maybe if she went to a used bookstore, they’d have some old sketchbook from twenty years ago, only half used with lots of blank pages left…

  Her gaze drifted to one of the many bookshelves lining the walls. Blank pages…

  She shot up out of her chair. Oh Lord, of course! What an idiot she was! The solution had literally been in front of her face the entire time.

  She ran to the nearest bookshelf and pulled out a book. She flipped to the end, and as she suspected, there were multiple pages sitting nice and empty, waiting to be transformed into identification papers. A laugh of glee escaped her. Trembling fingers counted the pages. Six blank pages in this book alone! She pulled out two more books. Only three pages extra in the first. But the second, a large history textbook that was more than fifteen years old, had ten blank pages at the end specifically for taking notes. Ten! And they were all in nic
e crackly yellow. She closed the book with a loud thwack and kissed the cover.

  She hopped up and down because her feet couldn’t contain her energy and then she skipped over to the record player. She put on the loudest record they owned, a Wagner opera. As soon as the booming horns and trumpets began, she bent over to pull out one of the ID booklets she’d carefully stashed at the back of one of the kitchen cabinets, then grabbed the book and ran over to where Mihai sat at his table. He didn’t look up as she approached, though she could have sworn she’d felt his eyes on her moments before.

  “Look!” she shoved the book under his face, flipping through to the blank pages at the end. She’d been keeping him appraised of her progress throughout the week. He’d been just as baffled as her about what to do about the paper shortage. Then she presented him with the finished identification booklet. She bit her lip. She’d done her first one yesterday, but hadn’t wanted to show him until she’d figured out everything and knew she could really do this.

  Mihai glanced briefly at the booklet, flipping through the pages and nodding. “I see,” he said. Then he went back to his notebook where a ruler marked the line he was translating.

  Tsura huffed out an annoyed breath. “You see. You see? That’s all you have to say?” She leaned over to whisper, always conscious to be careful even though she was confident the loud music was covering her words. Mihai’s desk was against the wall shared with the older couple, who, unsurprisingly, were arguing again.

  “I’ve been fighting for weeks to make sense out of all these funny chemicals, wasted enough paper to build a bonfire, almost singed my eyebrows off during one experiment that I may not have thought all the way through, I figured out how to get the image copied onto the stamp so that I could carve it and finally, finally, solved the paper dilemma. Which means I can do this, I can be a forger, it’s not only talk now. And all you can say is, you see?”

  Mihai shrugged, still looking at her with a calm expression, as if he did not have an ink-stained Roma woman who’d barely slept the past week and probably looked it, bouncing on the balls of her feet in front of him.

  “I knew you’d figure it out.”

  Tsura stared at him for a second, his confidence making something in her chest feel soft like putty. Then she thwacked him on the back of the head like she would have done to Luca. “Obviously. There was never a question! I was merely showing you my excellent work.”

  She sat on the arm of the couch, the piece of furniture nearest to his desk, and craned her neck to look at his notebook. Mihai’s ‘study’ was small enough that the desk was only a third of a meter from where she sat. “What are you scribbling away so feverishly at?”

  Mihai didn’t even look at her. He was back to making his careful notations. “You realize that couch has cushions for a reason?”

  Tsura grinned. Mihai hated it when she sat on the arm of the couch. Which was naturally why she did it. “Are you translating love poems? Is that it? And you’re too embarrassed to say? O Lucinda, you twist my tongue,” she recited with flair, a hand to her chest as she flitted her lashes, “you are so limber, lithe and young.”

  Mihai’s face went momentarily slack as he looked up at her, his pupils widening. But then the look passed and one side of his mouth lifted in his almost-smile. “That’s a Roma song isn’t it?”

  “How did you know?”

  He waved a hand. His voice was quiet, barely audible above the music. “Luca would sing them and occasionally translate. Only if I didn’t have a pen in my hand, naturally. You Roma and your secrecy.” He shook his head, then looked off into the distance. “The songs were so strange I’d remember them anyway. There was one lamenting a girl who was sold for a brass necklace. Her father, later full remorse, hung it on the door of his wagon and looked at it every night. Lots of others about traveling, or lamenting someone who’d died. And,” he glanced at her and then away. “Other things,” his cheeks turned ruddy.

  Tsura laughed. She knew what he was thinking of, the songs Luca had played the most, especially when it got late at night. The naughty ones that Roma girls were never supposed to know.

  “He taught me those songs too,” she said, still laughing. “He couldn’t help it. His fingers would move on the strings with all the songs they knew. I’d beg him and then he’d teach me the lyrics. He’d blame the music later and say he was drunk off it.” She shook her head, then tapped the notebook on the desk. “So, am I right? Love poems?”

  “Not quite,” Mihai said, still with the amused tilt to his mouth. “It’s a philosophical piece by an Englishman named William James. On Pragmatism.”

  “Pragmatism?” Tsura scoffed. “Tell me you’re joking.”

  Mihai’s now blank face told her he was not.

  Tsura bent over with her hands on the side of the large desk. “You’re telling me,” she said in barely a whisper, “that you translate boring documents for Nazis all day and then your reward to yourself when you come home is to translate an essay on pragmatism?” She threw her hands up in the air. “Couldn’t you at least translate Freud? Isn’t he the one who writes about all the secret naughty things our dreams are supposed to mean?” Mihai stiffened and his face reddened again, but Tsura was on a roll. This was the second time in as many minutes that she’d made Mihai all but blush, a handy trick now that she knew about it. “Or what about Italian? Is Italian one of the languages you speak?”

  “Not well enough to translate,” Mihai said.

  Tsura waved her hand dramatically again. “Well that’s your problem! Italian is the language of passion! They’re like us! They know how to feel. Romanians use music, but God knows you’re hopeless at carrying a tune.” She shook her head and made a face remembering all the times Luca had tried to coax Mihai into singing with him, but Mihai couldn’t carry a tune to save his life. Tsura cringed at the mere memory of it. “But the Italians use words.” She nodded decisively. “Yes, you need to become an expert at their language immediately. And then begin to translate operas.”

  “Operas?” Mihai choked out the word on an incredulous cough.

  “Yes, operas,” Tsura said with a wide smile. “Oh yes, that is the perfect remedy. Adventure and wars and doomed love and jealousies and great sacrifice and tragedy and heroism,” she held a hand dramatically to her chest, “preferably all in the same story. It’s just the thing.”

  “And how would you know?”

  “Luca used to take me whenever the Romanian Opera put on a new show, didn’t you know? We saw Aida and Faust and Madama Butterfly. Even Wagner here does not do too bad a job at it,” she gestured at the record player. “But it is the Italians who are the masters. Luca and I would weep like little children and then we would come out of the theatre feeling whole again.”

  Mihai shook his head. “I am trying to do something larger than making people cry at the opera or feel something for only one night.”

  “What could be larger than a good cry?”

  Mihai shrugged and looked down again at his book. He straightened his pencils. Tsura noticed he had a row of five of them lined up, all sharpened, even though obviously he could only use one at a time. As always, everything on his desk was perfectly aligned, all at precise angles. She was torn between rolling her eyes and frowning. She had assumed he merely organized everything each night once he was done with his work, but no, even now, while he was here using the desk, the papers weren’t scattered like she imagined a normal scholar at work might have them. His books and papers were stacked and aligned, all at ninety degree angles. Corners perfect with the edges of the desk.

  She wanted to bump the desk with her hip and send it all askew. Instead she looked back at Mihai. He hadn’t started translating again, he was just staring at the page.

  “What do you mean, something larger?” she asked

  He was quiet another long second. Was he not going to answer?

  But then he did, his voice soft. “Once this war is over, Romania will need to find her soul again.” Another
pause, and Tsura wondered if that was all the answer she would get. But then he went on. “She will wonder if she has one. With all she has allowed to happen within her borders, she will be right to wonder.”

  His jaw worked and he still stared at the paper, not meeting her eyes. “But people have been murdering each other for centuries and living with themselves afterwards. Romania isn’t the first to ask these questions. Why start from scratch when others have been pondering the same things for a very long time? I want to give our people the tools.” He looked up at her finally.

  “The tools to live with themselves?” she blinked, surprised at the depth the conversation had suddenly dropped into.

  Mihai tapped his pencil and lowered his eyes back to his notebook, his eyebrows knit together in a frown. “There are still too many texts to be translated. So much work to do. I try to pick an objective variety. Christian Orthodox scholars. Nihilists. Others with a more tempered, in-between approach like William James here. Resources for people to turn to when all the bombs have finished dropping. I still have contacts with my professors in the linguistics department. I think we can get university editions of the translations printed when the war is over, at least as a start.”

  Tsura felt that squishy putty sensation in her chest again as she watched Mihai. She hadn’t thought much about what he scribbled away at each night. He liked being buried in his books, she’d thought. Avoiding her and human interaction.

  Because of course the universe was centered around her. She rubbed her forehead, feeling stupid and ashamed. But no, here Mihai was again trying to save people, except this time it was their souls he was concerned about. How many books had he already translated? How many notebooks would she find on the wall beyond his desk that were waiting for the war to be over so they could be printed? Resources for a nation trying to put itself back together again, body and soul.

  But she couldn’t let Mihai see that she saw any of this. There was a delicate dance to be danced around Mihai, always. Why? she wondered. Why not let Mihai know that I see him? But that was silly. She shook away the thought as soon as it came.

  Instead, she put her hand to his cheek and gave it several rough pats like one might a child. “Oh Mihai, Mihai, you might be older, but sometimes I am still wiser,” she shook her head ruefully. “There are far greater truths to be found in fiction than in philosophy.” Then she sat back on the arm of the couch and grinned. “At least they’re certainly easier to swallow down when they’re wrapped up in a story. No, I am correct. Opera is still far superior. Opera’s like a truth crepe. Mmm, so much tastier.”

  Mihai blinked at her a few times, then he suddenly burst out laughing, a deep gravelly laughter that startled Tsura so much she dropped the pen she’d been fiddling with. Mihai’s whole body shook when he laughed, that big barrel chest of his trembling like a volcanic mountain. She’d never heard him laugh before. The sound lit her up from the inside out.

  He thwacked a fist on the table and managed to wheeze out between gasping breaths, “A… truth… crepe?” before losing himself into great chuckles again and grabbing his stomach.

  It was too much and Tsura began to laugh too. “Yes, the truth is the blackberry jam in the middle,” she said, coming up with more specifics spontaneously, “a little bit bitter and a little bit sweet,” she broke off in a fit of giggles, “and then all the lies and love and tragedy are the fluffy whip cream on top.”

  And then she and the most serious man on the face of the earth laughed so hard they couldn’t breathe.

  She was still laughing so hard she didn’t notice the knocking at the door until Mihai stood up, his body immediately going as taut as tuned piano wire. He moved swiftly to the door, listening. That was when Tsura heard it, the knocking, and the high pitched wail of a baby crying.

  “Elena,” Tsura said, hurrying to the door. Mihai put a finger to his lips, then gestured to the table where all of the forgery implements were still in plain view. Tsura swore under her breath and ran back to the kitchen table. She hurriedly capped all the bottles and placed them into the knapsack. She was still shoving sheaves of paper together when Mihai opened the door a fraction. The baby’s wailing became louder. Tsura was distracted from her task. The baby didn’t sound right. She shoved the papers in the bag and then hurried to the door, pulling it open wider.

  Elena was jabbering so quickly and the baby screaming these strange, high-pitched whines, Tsura could only make out some of her words. “Gheorghe… fever… Klaus and Cristina are both still at work.” Elena’s eyes were pinched from worry, and little Gheorghe’s whole face was beet red as he sagged against Elena. His arms still flailed against her chest, but weakly. When he did manage another noise, it was a small squawk, like a sickly bird.

  “It’s not normal, not normal,” Elena repeated over and over. Elena rocked him on her hip and Tsura had to agree, no, it didn’t look normal. Even though the baby was crying, or at least trying to, there weren’t any tears and his skin didn’t look quite right. Papery and thin-skinned instead of plump. His eyes seemed sunken in his face. Tsura put the back of her hand to his forehead and it was hot, very hot.

  “He’s been too hot,” Elena continued, pushing past Tsura and into their apartment, “and he won’t eat, not since last night, but it’s gotten worse all day.” Tsura tried to stop her from going in—the forgery supplies were still in the open knapsack on the kitchen table—but what could she say to the upset woman? She felt guilty even worrying about something like that when the baby was so sick, but after everything, they couldn’t be careless now. Tsura flashed anxious eyes at Mihai and then toward the kitchen table, while Elena continued in a rush, “And then Klaus, I can’t get hold of him, I call the office and they say he isn’t in, they can’t help me.”

  Mihai stepped in between Elena and the table, blocking her view. “Ambassador von Killinger had a late dinner meeting with some visiting foreign dignitaries. Klaus is probably still there.” He held a hand to the small of Elena’s back, subtly guiding her back toward the door. “Tsura will stay with the children. I’ll take you and the baby to the hospital.”

  For once, Tsura was thankful for Mihai’s cool head and demeanor. How did he do it? Take in everything at once and make calm decisions about it all? Elena seemed just as appreciative. She nodded over and over, still rocking the baby, blinking back her tears like an obedient schoolchild.

  They closed the door on their apartment, thank God, and followed Elena back to her apartment where it looked more chaotic than usual. The kitchen was still messy with leftover dishes from dinner. The table hadn’t been cleared and there were bread crumbs and dried pasta all over the floor from where one of the children must have spilled their plate. Two-year-old Brigitte was asleep on the couch, sucking her thumb. Dried red sauce covered her mouth and was splattered on her blue dress. Dieter and Irmgard argued over a train set in the corner but Elena ignored all of them, striding in and going straight to her room where she brought back a bag that was overstuffed with diapers and blankets. She shoved a towel from a drying rack beside the sink into the bag, hiked the lethargic Gheorghe up on her hip again and then turned to Mihai.

  “I’m ready.” Finally she glanced around the room. “Dieter, Irmgard,” she snapped. “It’s bedtime. Help Doamna Popescu get your sister to bed. She’ll stay with you until Tanti Cristina or Tati come home. Don’t give her any trouble or your father will hear about it, do you understand me?”

  The sharp tone to her voice must have sunk in because both children straightened their little backs and nodded obediently.

  Then with another whirl of activity, she, Mihai, and the whimpering Gheorghe were gone. Tsura whispered a prayer that the baby would be all right. The doctors would know what to do. The hospital Cristina worked at was closest and she should still be working her shift. That had to mean her family could get special treatment, right? Or at least move to the front of the line if there was a wait?

  Tsura turned back around to the children. Irmgard and
Dieter were back to arguing over the train. Brigitte coughed and then rubbed her nose with a drool and nose drip combination that smeared all over her face and mixed in with the dried sauce. Tsura frowned. There was nothing more she could do for the baby, but there was plenty to do here. Starting with getting these three little beasties in bed.