The funeral was held two days later. Tsura did not cry. Crying meant accepting that Luca was dead and that was a thing she could not do. Funerals were to say goodbye, she supposed, but how could you say goodbye when you couldn’t believe the one you loved was really gone?
Even when she saw the shape of her brother in the casket. Even when they lowered him into the ground. Even when the priest chanted through the death ceremony and waved his censor trailing smoke back and forth. It reminded her of her wedding ceremony. And like her wedding, this too had the sense of unreality, that she was in someone else’s body, trespassing in a dream.
Because that was what this had to be, wasn’t it? A dream? A bad dream that she would wake up from? But she’d been thinking that for the past two days, and she hadn’t woken up yet. She’d stayed with Luca’s body all of yesterday as was the Roma custom, but she hadn’t thought of it as keeping watch over the dead. No, she’d sat on an uncomfortable stool in the cold hospital basement beside the covered body, waiting for Luca to sit up and tell her it was all a garish comedy at her expense. Mihai had sat beside her, a requirement of the hospital administrator lest she become hysterical again. His money could only buy so much grace for eccentricity. She was a gypsy, after all.
Most of the snow had melted, but the ground was still frozen. They had to bury Luca in one of the underground crypts since they couldn’t dig into the earth.
The priest finished and the seal to the crypt was shut tight. Blood suddenly whistled in Tsura’s ears and she felt lightheaded. She turned to Mihai to tell him they had to open it back up again. That it wasn’t right, that if they just looked in the coffin one last time they’d see that Luca was fine. But when she looked up at Mihai’s face, she saw his eyes were red and he was swallowing repeatedly. Even though his chin was up, she could clearly see tear tracks on his cheeks, a fresh one spilling as she watched.
She blinked at him, feeling betrayed. How could he give up on Luca so easily? How dare he cry now? She turned her back to him. Her chest hurt. It felt squeezed in a giant’s fist. She gasped at the pain of it, and then her gasp turned to a gulp.
Seeing Mihai crying had somehow made it final to her. Luca was dead. He was gone from this world. Oh God, how could he be gone? Why would God take Luca but not her as well? Didn’t he know they were one soul?
She dropped to her knees onto the cold ground. The wrongness of it stole her breath away, and then she couldn’t seem to catch another one. She gasped with her mouth open, trying to draw in air, but unable to, like a gaping fish.
“Shh, Tsura,” Mihai’s voice was in her ear. He rubbed her back. “Take a breath. Calm down, you need to breathe.”
She managed a gasping breath but only a short one. Mihai crouched down on the ground beside her, pulling her to his chest. She wrenched out of his grasp. She didn’t want to turn to Mihai for comfort. That was wrong. The soft, sorrowful expression on his face was wrong too. She didn’t want Mihai’s softness. He shouldn’t be the one comforting her. That was almost as wrong as Luca’s body in the ground.
“Andrei,” she gasped out. “I need to see Andrei.” She stumbled to her feet, her legs wobbly. She hadn’t been able to eat anything this morning and she’d slept only when she took the sedatives the doctor gave her. “Now. Today. We have to go to Bacău.”
“Tsura,” Mihai said, “I’m not sure that’s—”
“We can leave as soon as we check out of the hotel.” She cut him off and turned away from him. “We didn’t bring much so it shouldn’t take long to pack. And Bacău is only a few hours by train.” She continued babbling out details as she walked from the cemetery to the hotel. She fell silent as soon as they got back to the road. Mihai didn’t say anything else and she was glad. She just wanted silence until Andrei could hold her in his arms. Only then could she cry.
She didn’t bother buttoning her coat back up. She welcomed the icy March wind. Numb, that was what she needed to be. Andrei could thaw her. But she didn’t need to think about anything until then. She would be a block of ice until then.
Mihai tried to talk to her a few times after they checked out of the hotel and then again once they were on the train. She ignored him. When he pushed a buttered slice of bread into her hands, she ate it only because he kept pestering her. It felt like a rock in her stomach.
She barely noticed the countryside passing out the window or the towns the train stopped at along the way. She closed her eyes even though she couldn’t sleep. Maybe Mihai would stop trying to talk to her if he thought she was sleeping. She pressed herself hard against the window, not wanting any of her body to touch any of his. Andrei, she only wanted Andrei. Andrei was the last of her oddly quilted together vitsa she had left. With their new IDs, they could go to any city in the country and be safe together. Besides, Antonescu was bringing back all the deportees from Transnistria. Everyone had far bigger things to worry about than a few stray Jews and Roma.She stood at the door as the train pulled into the Bacău station. As soon as the doors opened she was down the steps and jogging through the streets. She remembered the way.
“Slow down,” Mihai called from behind her, caught in the crush of people waiting on the platform. “Christ.”
Tsura didn’t slow. “I have to see Andrei,” was all she said when Mihai caught up with her. He kept pace after that. Her lungs burned by the time they got to his grandfather’s house, both from the cold and the exertion. She rarely had occasion to run, and after last week’s bedside vigil, she was weaker than normal. That was fine. She would collapse into Andrei’s arms. He would hold her while she cried and then while she slept.
She burst into Domnul Popescu’s house. They never kept doors locked out here in the village. “Domnule Popescu?” she called out as she came into the center room.
Domnul Popescu looked up in surprise from where he was reading in a rocking chair near the large ceramic hearth in the corner. “Tsura? What are you doing here?” He stood as Mihai followed her into the room.
“I need to see Andrei. Where is he living now?”
“Oh,” Domnul Popescu said, rising to his feet. “I haven’t heard from him in a few months now, but last I knew, he was staying in the Jewish quarter.”
“But that’s too dangerous!” Tsura’s hand went to her forehead, then she wrung both hands together, all while pacing back and forth in front of the ceramic hearth. “That’s why I made him the ID. Anything could happen to him in the Jewish sector. It’s not safe.” Then she stopped pacing. “Where? What street?”
“He said no one is rounding up Jews anymore,” Domnul Popescu said. “I send food sometimes to the family he’s living with.” He mentioned the address.
Tsura turned desperately to Mihai. “Do you know where he’s talking about?”
“Two blocks back behind the east marketplace, yes?” Mihai asked.
His grandfather nodded.
Tsura was already out the door again. She heard Mihai making excuses to his grandfather behind her, but she barely listened. She tapped her foot impatiently until Mihai came back out. She was sweaty underneath her coat from the running. She pulled it off and slung it over one arm. Finally Mihai stepped out the door and she all but dragged him down the street once he indicated the direction they should go. Several neighbors called out greetings as they passed. Tsura ignored them. Mihai nodded to some and told one particularly stubborn woman who followed them down the road that they were on an errand but would be happy to visit when they came back.
Tsura wanted to scream at them all for slowing her down. Her need for Andrei was an insatiable driving force. She felt nauseous with it. Only when she saw Andrei would her world make sense again. Maybe it never would without Luca in it, but her only chance was with Andrei.
Her mind suddenly ran through a million possibilities of bad things that could have happened to Andrei. Domnul Popescu said he hadn’t seen Andrei in a few months. So much could happen in a month.
She’d always believed she would’ve known if something were wrong with Luca,
that somehow she’d feel it, but now she knew that was mere girlish sentimentality. This world was harsh, cold, and rarely made sense. What if Andrei’s warm body was tucked just as deeply in the icy ground as Luca’s?
She was almost hyperventilating with fear as Mihai led her past the teeming marketplace and into the shuttered streets of the Jewish quarter. The houses had once been fine, she could tell, but many had been defaced, some even burned to the ground. Unlike the rest of the city, few people roamed the streets here. Tsura heard the distant wailing of a baby from inside the walls of one house, but the rest were eerily quiet. Mihai stopped in front of a dingy two story house.
“It’s this one,” Mihai said. Tsura ran up the front steps and pounded on the door.
After several long moments, the door opened a crack and an old woman with heavy wrinkles and a dull beige scarf wrapped over her head peered through the thin space. “What do you want?”
“I’m looking for Andrei,” Tsura said. “I have to see him.”
“There’s no one here by that name.” The woman went to close the door, but Tsura put her foot in the way.
“I’m his fiancée. I know he’s here. I lived with him in the Popescu’s basement, I have to see him.” She looked at Mihai and he nodded and pushed firmly against the door in spite of the older woman’s protests. It opened wide enough so that Tsura could slip through.
Her heart raced as she went past the woman, ignoring her mixed shouts of Romanian and what she assumed was Yiddish. In another second she’d see Andrei, and he would make everything better. He’d pull back the heavy lead blanket of despair she could feel threatening to descend over her. She knew the feel of it, the heavy metallic smell of it, hovering right behind her eyes, waiting for a moment of weakness when she couldn’t hold it back anymore. It would be so easy to let it drop, so easy. But no, Andrei would keep it back. He always could.
She pushed through the main room where a group of people, maybe ten to fifteen, gathered around a fireplace, searching every face for Andrei’s. Some exclaimed in surprise as she walked so boldly through the living room. The house was full, almost overstuffed with people. She’d known many families grouped together in houses to conserve food and warmth, but she hadn’t expected this many people to live in one house. She didn’t care. She’d live here too, if Andrei did. Or she’d take him with them to Bucharest. They could claim he was Mihai’s long lost cousin or something. Anything so they could be together again. She should never have left him in the first place, she knew that now.
She walked down a short hallway and then stopped in the kitchen. And there, standing beside a woman stirring something on the stove, was Andrei.
She stopped so abruptly that Mihai ran into her from behind. She hadn’t realized he was following her until then, and she did little more than register the fact now. All she could do was stare at the scene in front of her.
Andrei’s back was to her and his hands snaked around the waist of the woman standing at the stove. Then he nuzzled his face into her neck. Tsura must have made some kind of choked gasping noise, because both Andrei and the woman turned their way. Andrei’s face instantly sobered, the easy smile he’d had dropping.
“Tsura,” he whispered, and then he swore. “What are you doing here?” He stepped away from the woman who gave Tsura a puzzled look. Tsura could only look back and forth between Andrei and the woman, who was delicate and pretty. And Jewish. All the things Tsura was not. Tsura took a step back from the room and Andrei followed her. He grabbed her wrist.
“Let go of her.” Mihai stood to his full intimidating height. He reached for Andrei’s arm, but Tsura managed to mumble, “No, it’s fine, Mihai.”
Andrei needed to take her somewhere private and explain how this was all a mistake. That the woman he’d been with was just an overly affectionate third cousin. Or that he had to pretend to like her so he’d be welcome into the house. Yes, that had to be it.
Andrei pulled her into a small closet, apparently the only place they could get privacy in the house. It smelled like lye soap and wet wool.
“What are you doing here?” Andrei asked, his voice low. He touched a knob to turn on a dim overhead light. He wasn’t his usual smiling self. Instead his face was long and serious.
“I don’t understand,” Tsura said, her mind still not quite able to catch up with everything that was happening. “Who was that woman?”
Andrei ran a hand through his hair. It was long. He needed a haircut. “She’s my fiancée.”
Tsura stepped back against the wall as if she’d been struck. “But I’m your fiancée.”
He let out a long-suffering sigh. “Look, I would’ve sent a letter, but I couldn’t do that, could I? Besides, you should have known from the beginning it would never have worked out. You’re a goy and I’m a Jew. I can’t abandon my people now, not when we’ve been so broken.”
“My people are broken too,” Tsura whispered. It was easier to fight over the small details than take in the larger ramifications of what he was saying. “I’ve only been gone seven months. You said we were going to get married…”
Andrei shook his head with a mixture of impatience and pity. “We were only children then. I let myself get caught up with you instead of focusing on the needs of my people.”
Tsura angled away from him. This wasn’t Andrei. He wasn’t saying these things. This was all an extended nightmare that had begun the moment she’d walked into that hospital in Iași. Maybe earlier than that. When Mihai had first come home with news of a possible sighting of Luca. She’d fallen asleep that night and really, this was all just a very vivid nightmare. Her mind playing horrible, horrible tricks on her.
“You said I was yours and you were mine,” she whispered. “We promised each other forever.”
Andrei’s face hardened. “And then you went and got married anyway.”
Tsura’s mouth dropped open. “But you knew it wasn’t a real marriage. It’s only until the war is over and then—”
“And then you will be a divorced woman, and that is no better. I couldn’t be with a divorced woman, especially one who had married a Nazi-lover.” He took a step toward her and she flinched. He didn’t seem to notice. “Now listen, Tsura. I still care for you, of course, enough to tell you that it’s the Communists you need to be siding with in the upcoming months. Leave your husband. Otherwise it will go badly for you and everyone else who helped the Nazi murderers.”
“Communists?” Tsura gasped out. This had to be a dream. Every word that came out of his mouth made less sense than the last.
“The Russians are coming,” Andrei continued, “and they’ve always been kinder to the Jews than our own countrymen. We intend to be on their side when they take this country back from the Germans. Open your eyes. Don’t be a child anymore hiding behind your Nazi husband.”
Suddenly a switch flipped in Tsura’s head. She shoved Andrei hard in the chest. “A child? You think I’m a child?” She couldn’t help the hysterical edge to her tone. “I waited for you. I thought I was your fiancée. You knew my marriage wasn’t real. You swore you loved me! I believed you!”
Andrei’s head tilted sideways, in that pitying manner again. Then he put his hands on her shoulders. “We were good friends for a time, Tsura, but you’ll learn as you get older that there are seasons to life. We enjoyed our season together, but then it passed. What’s important now is the future.”
Tsura didn’t cry as whatever remnant left of her heart completely shattered. All her anger died with it. Of course Andrei had never loved her. What a fool she had been to believe in love and happy endings. Didn’t the Roma in her know better? She’d been too transfixed by the flashing smiles and the stomping beat to hear the screaming, mournful tune underneath the happy music. It was the most basic thing about life she’d been taught growing up. It was living among these gagii that had done it to her. Hope was a gagii word.
She pushed out of the closet and walked back down the hall, ignoring Mihai’s worried inq
uiries as she went. After pushing open the front door of the house, she stumbled into the muddy lane. She’d never even gotten the chance to tell Andrei that her brother had just died.
Chapter 18