Olesea Sirbu was a big girl, fata mare, and had been for years. She was fata mare because at 23, she was about to be a girl forever, spinster and virgin, never a woman, if she couldn’t get her boyfriend Oleg Bostan to marry her. Which is not to say that Olesea was indeed literally big — she was tiny and meek, only one and a half meters tall, and looked as young as her students at Codreanca School Number Three. Her hair, when not up in her teacher bun, floated softly around her ears, and she had blue eyes that blinked like the Soviet mass-produced baby dolls. She was no beauty, but she wasn’t hideous, either.
Today, Olesea Sirbu was at the absolute center of Codreanca’s gossip because she was going to be godmother to Tanya Pelin’s baby, and mortifyingly to everyone who knew her, the chosen godfather, Oleg Bostan, had been with Olesea since the summer, but here it was, well into the new year, 1993 very much underway, almost the end of February, almost Mărțișor and the start of spring, and no proposal. Nobody could say she wasn’t trying. Except they did. Every girl from her class was already married. Some of them had already been divorced.
There had been gossip about Tanya and Dima Pelin, too, Dima a cheater, a cad, but the baby had cleared it all up, everything forgiven and forgotten, and here they were now at the baptism. At the baptismal font, Oleg and Olesea stood as if they were strangers, not turning their heads from the new priest as he raced through the christening ceremony. First Dima, then Oleg, held the screaming baby.
All eyes were upon Olesea, on her puffed-up hair, on her good cloth coat with the unfortunate thread dangling from the cuff, on her high-heeled boots that her father had polished for her last night. The church was full of eyes, including the painted eyes in the calm frowning faces of the region’s oldest icons. They offered blessings, yes, but also additional scrutiny.
At the party, Olesea hid in the kitchen. She guarded the sarmale simmering in the pot, the stuffed grape leaves rolled into tiny packages like babies in swaddling. Olesea’s mother burst in calling, “Oh, they’ve already finished the first plates, and Olesea, have you talked to him yet? About the contracts for Israel?” Olesea shrugged. She started to grate the beets to decorate the salted fish and pickled tomatoes.
Valentina Petrovna brought chocolate liqueur for the ladies to share, pouring it herself to make sure no one skimped. Valentina Petrovna was the director of School Number Three, Olesea’s boss, too, and held the distinction of being addressed always by her Russian patronymic because she was so formidable. Olesea taught Russian at School Number Three, but people still tended to address her in Romanian, maybe because of her youth, maybe because she was timid.
Valentina Petrovna toasted, “May young mothers stay beautiful and young always!”
Tanya’s mother pulled Valentina Petrovna from the kitchen to start the dancing, putting on a string of current Russian pop songs all about love. The women danced together in pairs. They pumped their arms up and down as they crashed through the rooms. Unoccupied chairs fell over. Wine in abandoned cups spilled over edges and seeped into Tanya’s best tablecloth. In the corner, the men slapped down cards. They drank Dima’s homemade vodka and black village wine. The very young priest stroked his black beard and puffed out his rosy cheeks as he drank.
The first letter from Codreanca’s newest contract men in Israel was being read out loud by Victor Vancea, Olesea’s neighbor and childhood bully, because it was from his cousin and he wouldn’t let anyone else touch it. His cousin wrote that it was so warm you could swim in the sea in the winter if only they didn’t work you all the time.
Dima sat at Victor Vancea’s elbow. Victor Vancea jabbed him with it whenever Dima leaned in to see what was written. Dima dreamed of travel and the world outside of Moldova. He taught geography at School Number Three. Dima’s best friend Andrei Zubov was working in Russia now, in the far North. Oleg was only godfather because Andrei was gone and Oleg wasn’t. Oleg stood right next to Dima. It was clear to everyone at the party that they all intended to go, too, Oleg, Dima, and Victor. Both Oleg and Victor Vancea were former technicians at Codreanca’s refrigerator factory, which had closed two years ago in 1991 when small but crucial pieces could no longer be obtained from a refrigerator parts factory in Uzbekistan.
Since the summer, the only time Oleg didn’t drink a bit too much was when he worked the harvest. The rest of the time, he sat around his brother and sister-in-law’s apartment. He shared a bed with his young nephew, drank and read the scrapbooks of his Soviet Army days. He had been assigned to a bomb-building unit in Kyrgyzstan. He and his army buddies met Kyrgyz beauties on their days off. Those days were — as Oleg told Olesea whenever they looked through the scrapbooks together — the best days of his life.
The priest passed out on the sofa, his head on Victor Vancea’s shoulder. Tanya’s uncle filled Oleg and Dima’s drinks before they had time to finish them. The guests tore through the assorted luxuries: chicken necks and chicken feet in aspic, pickled apples, pickled watermelons, chocolates from the Bucuria store in Chișinău. Tanya and Olesea’s mothers brought in new plates until you couldn’t see the tablecloth any more.
At last, the men gave in and joined the women in their dancing. They whirled around next to their wives, stomping their feet on the floor. They danced horas to Russian pop tunes and Moldovan folk music, passing baby Sasha high over their heads. Her starched white dress crinkled as she passed from hand to hand. The scent of the cheapest apple spray deodorant sold that winter in the markets of Chișinău filled the room, along with the salty smell of their sweat. The guests continuously fanned themselves with their hands as if it were part of the dance, but they would not stop dancing. The circle had grown so large that there were two smaller dancing rings whirling inside the bigger one. Tanya’s parents spun as a couple in the center. Finally, Tanya and Dima moved into the inner circle. The ululations and clapping kept rising.
Oleg’s sweaty hand pulled Olesea more tightly into the spiral. The person holding her other hand kept changing, sometimes Valentina Petrovna, sometimes Olesea’s little sister Vica, sometimes their mother, often Tanya’s uncle, once it was even the priest, but no one ever dared to break in between Olesea and Oleg. Olesea was not Oleg’s last chance. Men had more time. It was just this year, this one year, that they crossed paths. He was waxing and she was waning, like the phases of the cold winter moon outside Tanya’s apartment window. A piece of plastic was taped over the window to hold in heat. It warped the moon’s image as if it were a melted plastic toy, the best the sky could provide under the economic constraints of the new regime.
The 1:08 a.m. train from Moscow on to Chișinău rattled by the apartment block. Whenever Olesea heard a train she wondered about the people on them, their lives rushing by like fluttering photographs, and wondered if they thought about her, the girl illuminated in the lighted window above.
Oleg’s hand slid away from hers as soon as the dancing stopped. Olesea caught her mother watching. Tanya’s mother, too. Tanya began graciously serving the sarmale. Tanya’s mother grabbed Tanya and Olesea, wrapping one arm around each of them. “My girls, my girls, how big you’ve got!” she said, and shook her head. She bumped their chins as she kept their heads pressed to hers. “And now you’re mothers!”
“Mama,” hissed Tanya.
“Oh, Olesea, I’m so sorry. It’s just that you should be a mother.”
Olesea ate a piece of sarmale solemnly and said nothing.
The 1:32 train, Chișinău/Bucharest, passed through, the curtains drifting elegantly in the sleeper car windows. Some people led lives that meant they had to leave for Bucharest at 1:32 a.m. and no other train would do: a relative suddenly taken ill, a reunion with a lover, a chance to study at the university in Bucharest on scholarship. Other people hadn’t been on the train in years, passing each day of their lives in the village they’d been born in. In the middle, you had the people like Olesea, who’d been on a train or two, but never to the end of the line.
Olesea, who had to be at school at 7:30 a.m. the next morning, began to push toward the door through the crowd of dancers. Tanya’s parents were despondent at her early departure. Olesea’s own mother said, “How could you?”
They made Olesea drink one last glass of red wine to compensate. She toasted Dima, “My God, you’re a lucky man.” Dima drank with her and kissed her cheek moistly.
“Adorable,” he said. “That’s what you are.”
Tanya cried, “But Oleg Bostan, aren’t you going to walk Olesea home?”
So they found themselves out in the snow, fur hats somberly set on their heads. Olesea thought of things that might amuse Oleg and decided not to say them. She would have told Tanya, or Grisha, her ex-boyfriend in Chișinău from when she was studying Russian literature at Moldova State University, but decided Oleg wouldn’t care if she pointed out the shells of eaten and abandoned sunflower seeds caught in the ice below them, like black stars on a white sky. Or how you could trace the activities of the children by the sled marks left at the end of the day. Or how the evening star had hung off the moon like a sock on a clothesline.
When they’d gone one block, Oleg said, “Luceafărul waits,” and pointed to the stars above them. Olesea had always loved that Mihai Eminescu poem about the evening star Luceafărul looking down on earth and falling in love with a beautiful girl, who also fell in love with him, but how could they be together, star and girl?
He said, “I guess you’re surprised someone like me even remembers it.”
“No, not at all. ‘Once there was a time like never before,’” she recited the beginning line of the poem. Then they were both quiet. She was surprised, not that Oleg remembered the line about Luceafărul waiting, they’d been forced to memorize it year after year, but that he chose to say it to her. She wished she had pointed out the evening star to him, earlier, when she first saw it. She could have set him up for his quote. Maybe she could have quoted something back to him. She might have passed the whole party warm with the secret that she and Oleg had shared something.
She didn’t notice Oleg reach for her gloved hand, but let him take it once he had. When they reached her door, she inadvertently gave him a stern look. He turned away to go. She grabbed him by the shoulders and kissed him hard. She asked him in a voice too bright, “You want to go for a walk tomorrow night?”
“If I have time,” he said. He wanted to be invited in, into the empty apartment, but Olesea was going to have to learn to be more strategic if she didn’t want to be stuck living in the wrong kind of novel.
“Goodnight, Oleg.”
“Goodnight, Olesea.”
What Codreanca didn’t know about Olesea but might have guessed was that she wasn’t technically a fata any more. Grisha was a year ahead of her at Moldova State, a lanky village boy from the southern Prut region. His longish Beatles haircut horrified his parents.
Chișinău itself came as a surprise. It felt Russian, not Soviet, at least in the corner by the Moldova State University, a green city of poplars, planes and lindens, the houses still in the style when Pushkin was there, painted mint green and pink and yellow that warmed her in winter. There were used bookstores where she could page through crumbling paperbacks, in Russian, not Romanian, but Olesea wasn’t political and she didn’t even notice until Grisha pointed it out. The tea at the student cantina was strong and black and cheap, and all afternoon there was someone there talking about poetry.
When she was most in love with him, that spring of their first year together, everything smelled like lindens. They walked around Komsomol Lake until their feet were sore, looking for somewhere to be alone. They had sex in her room, evenings when her three roommates studied at the library, Olesea biting down on the inside of her cheek to keep from making too much noise.
When he left her behind for Moscow, he also left his Aquarium album, the last one before the end of the Soviet Union, Equinox with its mysterious moons on the cover. She still had it propped up on her bookshelf so she could look at it, as if it were a painting she needed to study, even when Tanya made fun of her for liking something that marked her as old-fashioned now. Who still listened to Soviet underground music in 1993? Who was still nostalgic for being a dissident once that world had been swept away? She and Grisha had played the album over and over, lying in each other’s arms but with one foot on the floor in case their roommates came in.
Olesea wasn’t going to make it on her own to Russia, to Leningrad, Moscow, not even a smaller, less glamorous city like Novgorod, the way she’d always planned, whether she’d be following Grisha or not. Those cities were foreign now, as impossible as Berlin or Paris, scholarships cut off the same year she would have been eligible for them, because they were now in a different country. Olesea wasn’t even able to stay in Chișinău. She came home, grateful for Valentina Petrovna’s job offer at School Number Three.
They had all been in the same class at School Number Three: Tanya and Dima, Oleg and Olesea. Oleg was a quiet boy who didn’t get good marks, but wasn’t boisterous. He had hair between blonde and brown that hung over his eyes, like he couldn’t decide what color it should be, and whether he wanted to see or not. Sometimes, he muttered a joke which was passed around by Victor Vancea, proving that Oleg was not incapable of wit, although it wasn’t the kind of wit she admired. Olesea had let Oleg copy her homework sometimes, against her policy. He asked politely.
Oleg hadn’t been Olesea’s friend, but he hadn’t been an enemy, either, and she felt a vague warmth for him that was stronger than merely an affection for the familiar. When she asked Oleg why he thought about her again after such a long time, beyond the fact that he was back from Kyrgyzstan and she was back from Chișinău, his answers were unsatisfying. “I remembered you were nice. And clever.” Olesea hadn’t been nice at all, ambitious bordering on vindictive, a serious little girl, but if that’s how he chose to see her, fine. Clever, yes, but not in a way that was useful.
Oleg knew she wasn’t a fata any more, literally, and, in fact, was greatly enjoying the situation. In the summer, she and Oleg had done it in the forest at the edge of Codreanca, their backs full of insect bites, using the foliage for some kind of privacy. Neither of them had private rooms, let alone private beds. Now in the winter, they did it in Olesea’s apartment when her parents went to see her grandmother or pulled extra shifts at the hospital. Everyone in her family suspected, and they hoped to do their part to bring things to a conclusion as best they could.
What began to change Olesea’s mind about making Oleg marry her was the deterioration of her sanctuary, Codreanca School Number Three. Her classroom was so cold she taught with her gloves on. Her last piece of chalk was almost as small as a sunflower seed. Teaching, she found, was full of small indignities. But there were also larger indignities, facts she would even call injustices. She hated to see the students’ breath within the school in winter.
She loved Russian. She had wanted to study Russian literature, to know why in Chekhov no one could be with the ones they loved, to feel instinctively the impossible beauty of Pushkin’s poems, to try to figure out why Anna Akhmatova was so sad. If Moldova had been still part of the Soviet Union, the students would have received eleven hours of Russian instruction a week, including literature. Now students got only four hours, and instead of literature it was the intricacies of elusive Russian grammar. She hated it and the children did, too.
The eleventh form read out loud their compositions on Mărțișor, the beauty of winter and the coming of spring. She had hoped they would be excited about the holiday the way she had been, making pins decorated in red and white for everyone she knew, counting off which students and teachers were the most popular depending on how many Mărțișor pins they received (Olesea now as a teacher received far more than she ever had as a student), searching with Tanya for the first snowdrops huddled in the melting snow, but these students were either too sophisticated or too stultified to care. She had expected the older students to ask why they were writing about a Romanian holiday in Russian class, to use it as an opportunity to talk about how they all were lucky enough as Moldovans to have two cultural traditions, two language traditions, but none of the students were interested. The assignment was no more or less arbitrary as any of the others this week.
Halfway through the class, a voice behind the classroom door whispered, “Doamnă profesoară, doamnă profesoară.” Then came a nasty hissing laugh. “Profesoară,” the voice said again. The door kicked open. A snowball came flying at Olesea’s head. She ducked, and it splattered on her desk, the gray color of worn-out snow. Two more came, the aim now random. The door slammed shut. The student reading cowered under the table. Olesea asked her teacher’s pet, the one she tried not to dislike, to see who was there. The pet shrugged, nobody.
Olesea called on the next student to read her composition. The door flew open again and another snowball whizzed past her ear. A boy yelled, “Du-te in pula, doamnă profesoară!”
Suck my dick, missus teacher. It was said in Romanian, breaking the Codreanca code of etiquette that demanded all curses be in Russian to keep Romanian pure. Also, he used the informal you form of “te” instead of the “dumneavoastră” required when talking to teachers and people of authority and age. If only he had formally and politely asked her to suck his dick, she would have vastly preferred it.
Sometimes Olesea overreacted, like when she’d thrown a book at a student who said Lermontov was boring. Or when she sent the eighth form out into the hall because not one of them had done their homework and they wandered the halls like sheep until Valentina Petrovna asked Olesea to remember that a teacher is also a good shepherd. But she didn’t feel like she was overreacting now. She put her head down on the desk and sighed once, theatrically, like an enthusiastic actress in a melodramatic play, so the children could hear and know she was upset, but had kept a sense of humor about the situation. The bell rang and the students awkwardly escaped, and Olesea, too, once they were all gone.
After school, Tanya made ersatz coffee from Poland while Olesea played with baby Sasha and a squeaky rattle. They ate cold sarmale and split the last piece of torte, speaking fierce Russian, not the kind in literary textbooks but the kind spoken in Chișinău nightclubs, bars, and Moldova State University.
Tanya asked, “What’s with Oleg?” Baby Sasha started to cry as if she knew Olesea’s troubles. Tanya took her back.
“He wants to go to Israel.”
“How do you know?”
“He listens when people talk about it.”
“Everyone listens.”
“Oleg asks questions, too. And normally he doesn’t talk at all.”
Tanya asked, “So what do you want?”
“I don’t know.”
“If you don’t know what you want, you definitely won’t get it.”
“Dima wants to go, too. If nothing else, it will be easier for him to get laid outside of Codreanca. It will be you and me here, like always. Our mistake was not getting married in Chișinău.”
Olesea nodded. They finished a cigarette together on Tanya’s balcony, stomping their feet to handle the cold, the door propped open so they could listen for Sasha in her crib.
“Olesea, if you were the one to go to Israel, if you left, I don’t think I could take it.”
“Oh, Tanya, where would I go?”
“That’s just it! You’ve got to think of where you want, and what.”
She wanted to ask Tanya what Tanya wanted. The only thing Tanya would answer right now was that she wanted Sasha, and part of the time, that was a lie. Tanya couldn’t wait to hand the baby over to her mother, and she kept pointing out that it was her own granny that raised <i>her,</i> anyway.
As Olesea walked home, she didn’t know what she wanted as she slid on the ice in the dark, except for it to be warm again, for it to be spring, for Mărțișor and the small, slight hope it offered. She doubted if Oleg would even show tonight. Children were out in the cold and snow again alongside her, running their constant and patient wars. They tripped and hit each other over the head with sticks. They broke the legs off their dolls.
It was during the hours without electricity that she felt the most trapped. She sat in the dark with vague undefined shapes that turned threatening if she let them, stuck in this kitchen, without even the friendly crotchety whir of the refrigerator or the steady stream of news and folk songs on Radio Moldova. At the table, she worked on her Mărțișor pins. She was making one for not just her friends and family, but each of her students and the entire staff of School Number Three, not just the teachers but everyone. She’d made the red dye from onionskins, the way it was done for eggs at Easter. She filled each pin with flowers, not like the stingy ready-made Mărțișor pins at the kiosk near the train station, but as many as she could fit and still let the flowers hold their folded shapes.
Vica had forgotten to fetch the water again, and Olesea went off into the moonlight, pushing her foot against the base of the well to stabilize herself against the ice that gleamed treacherously all around, layer after layer of ice created by all the people dripping water when they poured it into their buckets. It was beautiful and sinister, transparent layers building up until it became opaque, and she stared at it for quite some time. She slipped with her bucket and fell sliding across the ice, and when she looked up, there was Victor Vancea and his cousin, laughing at her. They didn’t offer to help her up, just walked on arm in arm.
She heard the 6:17 from Chișinău, going on to the greater world, Kiev, Moscow while she was unbuttoning her boots. The electricity whirred back on. Her parents came back from the hospital and they sat down together to eat fried potatoes and the cabbage salad Olesea had helped her mother pickle back in the summer when she and Oleg were first being gossiped about. After six months of eating it, Olesea was sick of even the sight of it, limp and shining slick in the candlelight. Olesea’s parents ate in silence, tines clicking across the plates.
When Oleg arrived, his fingers were blue with cold. Oleg sat down in front of the television and waited with Olesea’s family for it to turn on. He shifted his weight back and forth and blew on his fingers. Olesea couldn’t bear to suggest a walk tonight. She went to the room she shared with Vica. Oleg did not follow her, his hopeful eyes on the blank TV screen.
“Oleg, come on in here. I want to show you something,” she called, sticking her head out from around the door, forcing herself to smile.
“What?”
“Come and look at my Mărțișor pins.” They ducked into the bedroom. Oleg kissed her. They fell on to the sofa that served as her and Vica’s bed when unfolded.
When they stopped and untangled themselves, Oleg’s hands coming out from under Olesea’s sweater, Oleg asked her, “What’s with the pins?”
Piled on the table were her pins, a garden of paper flowers fanning out before them. The pins glinted in the candlelight, winking at them. If she and Oleg could shrink themselves pin-sized, they could step out into the paper flowers rustling at their feet.
“Don’t you have it backwards? Aren’t students supposed to give them to you?”
“I wanted to give something to them this year.”
“What will Valentina Petrovna say?”
“That I will do anything to be popular, and that I have no sense of order.”
“You’re pretty when you’re worried,” he said softly. He looked her up and down, as if he were measuring parts for refrigerators, or bombs.
“What are you worried about, Olesea?”
“Are you going to go to Israel? And if you are, when were you going to tell me?”
“I think I’m going to go.”
“So you’re telling me now.”
“I’m telling you now.”
“God, why did I have to ask you, Oleg?”
“I don’t know.”
“What is the contract like?” She was as far away from him as possible on the small sofa, in the corner, her legs tucked underneath her.
“It’s good. Victor Vancea’s signing up men from Codreanca working through a company in Romania. You get to keep your own passport and some men from Lozova are already there and say it’s OK.” Oleg slid down the couch and tried to put his arm around her. She ducked.
“When do you go?”
“Next month.”
“For how long?”
“A year.”
She blurted out, “Well, see you when you get back.”
Looking up at the ceiling, he mumbled, “Want to marry me when I get back?”
“Oh, God, Oleg, you just want to make sure I’ll write you letters when you’re gone.”
“Olesea.”
“Yes?”
She was blushing. No one had asked her to marry him before. She felt feverish, but because it was February maybe she really had a fever. In Russian literature, nobody ever married the person they loved. Her own parents were wedged side by side in a tiny apartment but more like respected colleagues, or veterans of something, than spouses, let alone lovers. Her grandparents survived the famine of 1947 only to lose each other later, in Kazakhstan during the deportations. Only her grandmother had come home. She’d lit candles in her kitchen in front of his photograph every forty days for as long as Olesea could remember.
“Are you going to say yes or no?”
She held her Mărțișor pins in her hand, the cold metal points pricking her fingers. Oleg covered her icy hands with his, crushing the flowers and driving the pins into her palm. He kissed her. Later on, she would look back on those two days leading up to Mărțișor as the inevitable beginning of her disastrous marriage. Her life was about to move forward from one intolerable state to the next, like Mărțișor’s move from frozen winter to a muddy, disappointing spring. She held Oleg’s sweaty hand, and they went into the kitchen to announce the news to her parents.
Image by Liviuss76 on flickr.com, licensed under CC 2.0.
