Originally he had been a supporter of Ceauşescu. In fact, his father, Andrei, had been a friend of Ceauşescu’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 Ceauşescu.
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 Ceauşescu: 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 wire grass, 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 Ceauşescu. 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 Ceauşescu 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.”