Tsura: A World War II Romance

September 1, 1943

  My beloved Andrei,

  It has now been four weeks to the day since I last saw you, last felt your arms around me and your lips pressing into the soft place right beneath my ear. Did I ever tell you how much I melted when you kissed me there? There is so much I wish I’d said to you before I left. I wish we’d been able to dance together. I wish we’d been able to walk underneath the sky holding hands. I wish I’d told you I loved you one more time. A thousand more times.

  Bucharest is not as I remember it. At least what I can see out the window that looks down on Strada Brătianu. The wide boulevard is always so busy. So many people. The trams always running and the horses and buggies. There are cars too, but less than before the war. I think the difference is that everyone seems to walk so fast and in such a hurry all the time.

  There are no more lazy strolls like people used to do in the afternoons and evenings down Calea Victoriei. Especially in the long summers like this one. Luca would make me put on my best dress. We’d buy ice cream and then we’d join with every one else walking past the beautiful Athénée Hotel with all its exotic foreign travelers sitting in the lobby and smoking. Then we’d pass by the Palace and Luca would whisper in my ear, “What do you think the King and Queen and the young Prince are doing right at this moment?” And I’d feel so giddy imagining, in that beautiful building right across the street, was actual royalty, not just the kind I heard about in fairy tales.

  Now I spend hours and hours peeking out the brown curtains, not daring to open them all the way in case someone sees me and begins to ask questions. It has been harder than expected to get fake papers for me. It feels like I’ve only exchanged one prison for another. You are the last person I should complain to. You have only the basement walls and the Weinbergs to fill your days and I have a whole city to watch pass beneath my window. Or perhaps none of these distractions make any difference to either of us, because our torture is the same. You are not here. I am not there. At the moment, there is nothing we can do to change it.

  Tsura lifted her pen from the page and looked around. Mihai had a large inheritance from his grandfather on his mother’s side, so why did he live in this single-room studio apartment? The bed was all but in the living room, as was the kitchen, which merely took up the far right corner by the single large window. The kitchen was simply outfitted, with a stove, sink, and tiny square of countertop that was always covered by the drying dishes. Tsura prepared all the food on the table set up beside the kitchen. The table chairs backed up against the couch, which acted as a divider, offsetting Mihai’s study area from the rest of the room.

  The study was dominated by a huge desk that Mihai kept in perfect order. Mihai sat there for hours each night translating dense texts. If Tsura moved even a pencil out of place during the day, he would notice and lecture her about not touching his things. She’d made that mistake only once. She’d been trying to do a deep cleaning of his baseboards and had bumped into the desk. What else was she supposed to do with her days? Infuriating.

  At least there was a separate bathroom. And piped in plumbing. Compared to how she had lived most of her life, this apartment was a palace. But palaces still had walls. These walls were painted brown, which made the apartment feel dark and even smaller. Though one could hardly see the brown since the walls were covered floor-to-ceiling in shelves of books. Maybe that was why Mihai had gotten the apartment, for the shelf space.

  She closed her eyes and let herself imagine Andrei’s face. His arms around her. She frowned when the memory was slightly fuzzy around the edges. She wasn’t sure if she remembered what his arms actually felt like or just a story she’d begun to tell herself about the memory. It was the danger of being a storyteller. Memories morphed into stories and the true sensory details of the past were lost to the fairytale it became. She didn’t want Andrei to be a fairytale. She wanted him true and solid beside her.

  She continued writing.

  I live for the days when we’ll be together again. I stare at the pictures I drew of you in my little notebook and try to draw new ones, but they are never the same as when I was sketching while I looked at you. I break my own rules and imagine our future together. I want to go bury myself underground like a winter bulb. I’ll sleep there, quiet and cold, while the world continues its mad storm overhead, and then—in spring—you’ll dig me up again and we’ll be together.

  Tsura threw down her pen, feeling sweaty and missing Andrei so bad it ached in her ribs. Since it was still summer, the apartment was constantly sweltering. Opening the window allowed for a tiny bit of relief. The overhead fan only swirled around the already hot air. Tsura wiped the sweat off her brow with her shoulder.

  She shouldn’t have written the bit about wanting to sleep in the earth like that. It was an old thought. A dangerous one. That way lay numbness and blank despair.

  She squeezed her eyes shut. When she opened them, she noticed her pen had spilled ink from the fountain tip all over the dining room table. The devil! She swore and grabbed a kitchen towel to clean up the spill that marred the yellow linen table cloth. No matter how much she scrubbed, though, all she managed to do was ruin the kitchen towel as well.

  Letting out a huff of frustration, she grabbed up the letter and went to the matches they kept beside the stove to light the burner. Why did she keep writing these inane letters? She could never send them. Still she wrote, to Luca too. Silly scribbled words that were burned before they could take flight. Anything on paper was too dangerous, damning if it landed in the wrong hands. Her and Andrei’s recklessness in going out to the shed had already cost too much. It was an indulgence to even put the words down in the first place.

  She struck a match and held it to the corner of the letter. Her words to Andrei curled brown and then black. The whole thing was aflame before she dropped it into a dirty pot full of water waiting to be cleaned in the sink. Her nose wrinkled against the smell of burned paper that filled the kitchen. She waved the ink stained towel against the smoke to help push it out the window and then began to laugh because laughing was better than crying.

  The rattle of the key in the lock made her stand up straight and plaster a smile on her face. Mihai was home.

  Her disrespect for him had only grown tenfold in the month she’d been living with him. Watching him leave each morning to work for the murderers had made it more real. More reprehensible.

  He was meticulous about his morning routine. Everything had to be just so. The man ironed his undershirts, for God’s sake, and spent more time in the bathroom each morning on his toilette than she did. Tsura had only her burnt up words to cling to, meanwhile Mihai was intent on impressing the bastards reinforcing the miles between her and both Andrei and Luca.

  Tsura hurried so that she was right inside the door before Mihai had it open. She put her hands demurely behind her back. Mihai looked at her impassively. Or was there a slight curious tilt to his eyes? Usually Tsura ignored him completely when he came in. Well, she tried to. Then there were the days she was weak. It was just… The silence, the old creeping numbness that threatened when her long mornings alone in the apartment stretched out into longer afternoons. Until she found herself lighting up inside like a dog looking forward to a treat when Mihai came home each night. The two nights a week he worked out at the boxing club and came home late, she paced until she wondered if she’d eventually wear grooves into the flooring.

  But then Mihai would come home. When he entered the apartment, the room that seemed so empty all day long was suddenly too full. He had a quarter-hour routine of polishing and buffing his shoes and she savored the noises of the scratch, scratch and then swish, swish, swish of the different brushes he used. Then there was the way he spent another ten to fifteen minutes shuffling and arranging the papers on his desk before he began to scratch away at his translations after dinner. He made so much noise and filled a room completely, he brought the electricity of human life to the air. And each morning after he left the silence was ever more
oppressive in its emptiness.

  Still, she hated it. Hated that this Nazi-lover had any power over her at all. Maybe that was what had driven her to take a different tactic today. If Mihai wanted to be German so badly, then wonderful. She would be a good little German wife.

  “Guten abend, Herr Popescu,” she said brightly after he took off his shoes and lined them up carefully next to his briefcase beside the door. She used the German phrases she’d learned from one of the old German primers he had on his shelves. Apparently the man didn’t know the meaning of throwing a book away, though obviously he had no use for the elementary German texts. “Sie sind hungrig?” Are you hungry?

  Mihai only stared at her a few beats longer than normal, but his face didn’t even twitch, devil him.

  “Ja, ich bin hungrig.” His voice rang out in a perfect guttural accent. She hated when he spoke German. Hated it. That was the double edge of this ploy, or maybe the point of it. How long would he pretend this was normal, that this was all fine? That what he did for his work was perfectly fine?

  She gave him a big fake syrupy smile. “Wie schön.” How nice. “Ich kockte sarmale.” I cooked sarmale.

  She turned her back on him and walked over to the kitchen where she pulled out two plates and pulled the top off of the pot simmering on the stove. The smell of boiled cabbage wafted out as steam filled the already hot kitchen. She winced away from the steam. Maybe she should have just served bread and salami for them to eat tonight. Something that didn’t require the stove.

  But cooking took up time, and she had hours to fill. Besides, it had been an interesting experiment trying to follow the recipe in the cookbook Mihai had on his shelf—one of the few books that had been all but untouched. Cooking had always been something she’d meant to learn. It was an embarrassment really that she didn’t know how to cook beyond frying potatoes and meat. Most Roma girls grew up next to their mothers and sisters learning how. But her mother had died when she was young, so she’d grown up carving wooden trinkets for market beside Grandfather Besnik and singing along with father’s fiddle. Right around the time everyone had decided it was time for her to stop being a child and start being a woman, she’d been sent to live with Luca. He’d been used to cooking for himself or bringing home food from cafes and she’d missed the whole learning-to-cook lessons beyond dropping things into oil and frying them.

  She used a large spoon to ladle out the sarmale onto the plates and frowned. Hmm. That didn’t look like the sarmale she’d grown up eating. She’d wrapped the meat, rice, and spices in the cabbage leaves, but instead of coming out in neat little rolls like she’d always seen before, the cabbage leaves had come undone and now all the ingredients were mixed together with the water she’d boiled them in. The cabbage leaves had just kind of shredded and were floating around in an unintentional soup. Except it was just water instead of proper ciorbă broth. She grimaced and tried to strain the excess water out. Oh well. She splattered the mixture onto plates and set one in front of Mihai. She washed her hands and then sat down with her own plate. He said nothing about the ink-stained tablecloth, though at this point the thing was useless for anything else than kitchen rags or quilt squares.

  Mihai shrugged out of his suit coat. Like her, his shirt was slicked down to his skin with sweat. he took a bite and winced as his tooth cracked into something hard. Tsura quickly took a bite as well, crunching into a grain of hard, uncooked rice.

  The recipe had said to cook the rice first, but that had seemed unnecessary since it would all be boiling in the pot… Tsura merely smiled serenely at Mihai. She searched her mind for a German phrase to ask if something was wrong. She wondered if he would come out and call her a bad cook to her face. Finally she keyed in on a word that would work, since it was close to the Romanian. “Problem?”

  “Nein, kein problem.” He said with his usual bland face and took a bite. There was another audible crunch of rice.

  Their neighbor’s voices sounded through the wall beside the kitchen. They could always hear their neighbors talking through the thin walls, an older man and wife whose constant arguing reminded Tsura of Liviu and Eva. It started up almost every evening when the man got home from work. Tsura could never understand any of it since it was in German. In spite of the spartan apartment, Mihai did have a record player, and Tsura often put one on to drown out the arguing.

  Tsura continued eating the meal. She’d grown up with all manner of food she could beg, hunt, forage, or steal, so a little uncooked rice was nothing to her. She knew she must have measured the herbs and seasonings wrong as well because the dish was rather tasteless. But it was food in the belly and that was all that mattered.

  Still, Mihai was annoyingly unperturbed by the lacking quality of the meal. That might have been unintentional, but she’d spent all afternoon studying the spattering of German. A man like him deserved more than a prick in his conscience and she’d been sharpening herself like a tack all afternoon.

  "Wie war die Arbeit heute?” How was work today? Another of her practiced phrases.

  Mihai looked up from his meal. He muttered a long string of German that she couldn’t understand but suspected was a curse. Then he wiped his mouth with his napkin and set down his fork so forcefully it clanged against the table. She felt a devilish wave of glee at having affected him even the slightest little bit. But the next moment his face was back to the mask. He grabbed a slice of bread that she always set on the table for meals and buttered it. “Die Arbeit war gut.” Work was good.

  She shuddered internally. She hated to think of what constituted a good day at the Nazi ambassador’s office.

  “Wie schön. Übersetzen keine Bestellungen Tod heute?” How nice. Translate any death orders today?

  Mihai shot up from his chair and put his hands on the table. He leaned over, invading Tsura’s space. “Why are you talking about these things?” he hissed in a whisper, in Romanian now. “I’ve told you people could be listening. We’ll not speak of these things.”

  He spun away and paced the kitchen as if trying to gather his calm back to him. Tsura sat back in her chair and crossed her arms over her chest. She was torn between wanting to smile at having cracked his unfeeling shell and wanting to scream, to demand to know what was wrong with him that he could work for murderers. He did not want to speak of these things? He did not want to speak of the way General Antonescu gave orders that for any act of “sabotage,” whatever that meant or could be interpreted to mean, twenty-five Jews would be murdered? He did not want to speak about Transnistria, where who knows what could be happening to Luca?

  Before she could ask any of those things, though, Mihai looked over the sink and grabbed the plant off the hook hanging in the window.

  “What did I tell you about this plant?” he asked, lips tight. “It’s not supposed to get too much light. I learned its schedule when I bought it. I put it in the light when it needs it. Leave it on the counter the rest of the time.”

  Tsura rolled her eyes. He had told her before about the plant, but then she’d spent her days looking at the poor thing shriveling up and dying because it didn’t have enough sunlight. And well, she’d felt a kinship with the devil plant so she’d set it back into the light.

  Tsura grabbed the pot back from Mihai. “Which one of us is a Roma and which an idiot gagiu?” she asked sharply. “I have come across this plant often enough in the wild and it needs direct sunlight! You are killing it with your stupid gagii ways. Killing is all you know how to do!”

  Mihai grabbed the pot back from her, but she wouldn’t let it go. In the struggle, Mihai wrenched it from her hands but didn’t fully grasp it; it fell to the floor. Tsura dove uselessly. It exploded in a mix of soil, roots, and shards of pottery.

  Tsura and Mihai both stared at it, frozen for a second. Then Tsura dropped to her heels, fumbling through the soil to gather the roots together. “We just need another pot. Do you have another pot? If we transplant it quick enough, it should be all right. And soil, we really should g
et fresh soil.”

  She held the sad, flopping stems in her hand. They looked half dead already. Nonsensical words kept gushing out of her mouth like a geyser, “I don’t really know how to take care of plants in pots though. They were always in the ground when we used them for herbs growing up. And they had worms wriggling around the soil. Nana Bănică, she wasn’t my Nana, she was just one of the oldest women in the vitsa you understand, always said it was worms that made the herbs grow best. But I don’t suppose worms want to live in pots anymore than the plants do!”

  And then Tsura started to cry.

  She had not cried when Luca was taken away. She had not cried when she’d been forced to leave Andrei. But here she was crying over a stupid little plant. And for more than the plant, maybe for all of it, but she would not think about that. She pressed her soil covered hands against her eyelids and cried.

  “Christ, Tsura. I’m sorry,” Tsura heard Mihai’s voice crack as his feet stepped closer to her. Ah, she had broken into Mihai at last, and here she couldn’t even celebrate the victory of it.

  She wiped her eyes with the backs of her hands that were still clean and then got to her feet. She ignored Mihai where he hovered beside her and went to the bathroom. Calmly, the tears clearing, she washed her hands with ritual slowness, then her face. She blotted her cheeks with the towel, not looking at herself in the mirror. She took a deep breath and then went back out to put away the rest of the sarmale and clean up the mess on the floor.

  She paused in surprise outside the bathroom door.

  Mihai was on the floor awkwardly dropping handfuls of dirt into a large crystal vase where he’d stuffed half the roots of the plant. Mihai looked up at her as she took a step closer. He had a smudge of dirt across his nose and for a short flash of a moment, Tsura had an image of the over-starched Mihai as a little boy, digging in the dirt. It was an entirely incongruous picture. Yet here he was, knees in the dirt.

  “It’s not the best fit,” he gestured at the vase. “But I thought it might keep for the night. I’ll buy a proper pot tomorrow. The rest should go in another vase.”

  For the first time with Mihai, Tsura didn’t have a witty comeback. She was quite speechless. She could only nod and watch dumbly as he stuffed the rest of the plant into the second vase, then she went and quietly got the broom to sweep up the lingering dirt and pot shards. They didn’t speak.

  When they’d almost finished up, an air raid siren split the night.

  Chapter 8