“It’s true. Romanians have a word for it: ghinion. It means don’t speak aloud what you want most. Otherwise it will not happen. You must have a word for this in English?”
“Jinx.”
“Okay. I did not tell you about my sister because of jinx.”
“Why did you tell me her name meant ‘well lit’?”
“Pardon?”
“The other day I asked you, and you said that ‘Rilia’ was the word for ‘well lit.’ ”
“No, no. Rila is the word for ‘well lit.’ Rilia is my sister.” He smiled and kissed my face. “We will have to work on your accent.”
Over the next month we settled into a routine. When Rezvan finished writing his letters in the night, he padded down the driveway, set the letters in the mailbox, and lifted the tiny, stiff red flag so that our mailman would stop in the morning. And then, after Rezvan was asleep, I would rise out of bed and go to the mailbox myself, pick out the ones to Rilia, and slip them into the pocket of my housecoat. I did the same thing with the letters she sent him. I collected those in the morning.
At first it didn’t feel like a strategy. I was desperate to know if Rilia really was his sister or his wife — as if her handwriting would tell me. Rezvan left for work an hour before I did, and I opened the letters then. I sat on our bed, laying the pages in front of me, cross-referencing. Some of her passages were blacked out by censors. I found many names, but mostly two, Gheorghe and Florian, again and again. Gheorghe and Florian, Gheorghe and Florian, Gheorghe and Florian. I began to realize, very slowly, that these were probably their children.
On one of these mornings my mother showed up at my door to drop off a skirt she had sewed for me. “Good,” she said, bustling in, “you’re home. I wanted to drop this off.” Already, as she said this, she was rapidly moving through the rooms of our apartment. My mother liked to do this, to catch me off guard and check all my rooms immediately for anything I might hide if given the time. “What is this?” she said, reaching the bedroom, where all the pages were strewn across the bed.
“Oh, that’s just some stuff I’m reading for Rezvan. Proofreading.”
She picked up a sheet. “Oh, so now you proofread in Romanian?”
I smiled weakly. She didn’t pry, but for once I wished she would. What I wanted to do was tell her that this was my life spread across the bed, thin as paper, written in a language I could not understand, dotted with four names — Rezvan, Gavrilia, Gheorghe, Florian — but never my own. I wanted to ask her how she felt when my father was having an affair. And I wanted to ask what happened to the other woman. My father never married her, even after he and my mother split. Where had she drifted off to? Did she ever lose her breasts? Did she get well again? Was she happy somewhere now?
I didn’t tell my mother anything, but when she left that day, she gestured toward the bedroom. “You know that you can find people at the university who will translate that for you.”
I nodded and stared at my feet.
“Maybe you don’t really need them translated? Maybe you already know what they say?” She ducked her face under, so that she could look at my face. “It’ll be okay,” she said, “either way.”
I stockpiled the letters for two months. I didn’t intend to be malicious; I was just sitting on them until I could figure out what to do. Every night as I drove home from the fields, I thought, I will tell Rezvan tonight; I will say I know everything and I am leaving. But when dinner came, I could hardly speak. It was as if I were eleven all over again.
Even Rezvan was getting depressed. He said that his letters were turning out to be all in vain. Perhaps, he said, he would quit writing them altogether. One night he said, “Nothing gets through those bastards. Perhaps I will never see Rilia again.” Then he limped to the sink, rocking back and forth, and filled his glass with water. He turned to me and said, “Why would they want to keep us apart, anyway?” His head was tilted to the side, and he looked like a child. He stared at me as if he really expected me to answer.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know about that stuff.”
But of course I did. At the other end, across the ocean, men in uniforms were collecting letters and censoring them, blacking out whatever threatened them, and at this end I in my housecoat was doing the same thing.
I tried to rise above the situation, but that strategy didn’t work at all. I was increasingly distressed at what I saw. I’d fly up and look down. There she is, I’d say, Margit Bergen of Saskatchewan. Who would have thought she’d grow up so crooked, crouched on her bed, obstructing love, hoarding it, tearing it apart with her own hands.
Until this point in my life I had always thought of myself as an open-minded person, able to step into another’s shoes. But I could not picture this Rilia. Her face, and the faces of her children, were blank for me. I hoped that this inability, or unwillingness, to imagine another’s face was not hatred, but I was deeply ashamed that it might be.
Finally, one windy night in November, as I cut into a roast, I said, “Rezvan, is Rilia your wife?”
“What do you know of Rilia? Has she called? Has she sent a letter?”
“No, not at all. I was just wondering.”
“Tell me what you know.”
“I don’t know anything. I was just asking.”
“Have you spoken to her on the phone?”
“No, I have not.” I enunciated this very clearly. “Is she your wife, Rezvan?”
“I am not a liar,” he said. “I will marry you to prove this. We will go to British Columbia and get married in the trees. Whenever you want. Tomorrow, if you like.”
—
The next morning I put the letters in a bag and drove straight to the administrative offices at the university. A woman disappeared and reappeared with a list of professors who could translate Romanian for me. I had my choice of four. I glanced down the list and there, at number three, was Professor Roland Pine.
I found him in the same office. He had aged well, his hair now ash instead of blond, a few extra lines across his face. When he stood up to greet me, I saw that I had grown to be about half a foot taller than he was. His tic was still there, flashing across his face every fifteen seconds or so. As I shook his hand, I marveled that it had continued like this since the last time I’d seen him, keeping time as faithfully as a clock.
“My name is Margit Bergen. I came to you once as a child.”
“Hello, Margit. It’s nice to see you again. Was I helpful?”
“Yes, very. I’ve always been grateful.”
“What was the problem in those days?”
“Just childhood depression, I guess. My parents were splitting up.”
He squinted at me, and turned his face slightly to the side. “Oh, yes,” he said. “That’s right. Of course. Little Margit. You were such a girlie-whirl. So sad. What did you become?”
“You mean in my life?”
“In your life. What did you become?”
“A soil consultant.”
“What a good job for you.” He gestured toward the black leather chair. His birds fought in their high cages, their wings tearing at each other. “Mortalhead. You be nice to Eagerheart.” He turned to me. “The kids love funny names, you know. Mortalhead, Eagerheart, Quickeye.”
I smiled and sat down in the chair, pulling a stack of letters from my bag. “Professor Pine,” I said.
“Call me Roland,” he said. He leaned back. His face cracked in a tic. “Roland Boland. Just think: little Roland and little Margit, the professor and the soil consultant, back again, sitting in a warm office surrounded by bird-people.” He rolled his eyes and grinned, almost girlishly.
I didn’t know what to say. “Yes, it’s nice,” I eventually said. “Actually, Roland, I was wondering if you could help me out with a problem I have.”