Under a Red Sky (5 page)

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Authors: Haya Leah Molnar

BOOK: Under a Red Sky
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“Not the best quality,” Mama says, “but the best we could afford after saving from two salaries for four years.” Next to the armoire is the Biedermeier chest of drawers. It is quite beautiful, and, Mama says, it is museum-quality. A small oil painting is perched on
top of the chest, leaning against the wall. It is a portrait of a woman with flaming red hair who looks the way I imagine courage might look, if it had a human face. The painting is a reproduction of a famous Degas portrait that my cousin Mimi has painted. Mimi is an artist well known enough to be allowed to travel abroad. Tata, however, loves to remind Mama that it certainly doesn't hurt Mimi to be married to the director of the National Museum. “We're artists too, Stefica, but we're hardly allowed to travel past the Ci
migiu Gardens in Bucharest,” he says, smirking. Sharing center stage on top of the Biedermeier chest are an ebony mantel clock with brass fittings and a hand-painted porcelain vase. The roses and lilac blossoms depicted on the tall vase look so real, I can almost smell them.
My narrow bed is separated from my parents' bed by a bookcase that serves as our room divider. The back of the bookcase faces my bed. The shelves face my parents' side of the room and are packed with art books and a thick, leather-bound volume of the complete works of William Shakespeare. Mama has sewn a curtain out of a sheet and hung it at the foot of my bed to fill the gap between the bookcase and the wall. “Now you have your own little room,” she says, drawing the curtain after tucking me in. The light from the bedroom filters through the yellow material with its blue cornflower pattern. Wedged against the bookcase is my night table, a heavy iron safe decorated with Roman soldiers in full armor—helmets, shields, and spears. The lid of the safe is so heavy, I have to ask for help each time I want to lift it open. The underside of the lid houses the safe mechanism, lots of wheels and gears, all in need of oil. Stored inside this safe is my most important treasure,
a collection of dog-eared comic books that Tata's artist friends have smuggled in from France.
On warm summer evenings Tata lays out a thick green army-issue blanket on the cold floor of the terrace and fluffs my pillow. He covers me with a soft cotton blanket and surveys the night sky before returning to our room.
“Look at these stars,” he whispers, gazing up at the moonless expanse. “These very same stars shine over other countries,” he says, turning to me and pointing to a cluster of bright stars directly above my head. “Far away from here,” he whispers. I don't know if he's referring to the stars above or to other countries. Both feel equally remote to me.
“Is it different in other countries?” I ask.
“Very,” he answers before returning to our bedroom. “In other countries the stars do not rise in a red sky.” I want to ask him what he means by “a red sky,” since all I can see above is the black night shimmering with countless stars, but his voice stops me. “Good night. Go to sleep now.”
“I want to say good night to Mama,” I tell his shadow standing against the yellow light of the bedroom.
My mother's silhouette appears in the doorway. She sits down next to me on the blanket and tucks her legs in.
“Tell me about when I was born,” I ask just before drifting off.
“You were the most wanted child in the world,” she whispers, stroking my head. “The doctor said I could no longer get pregnant. I had lost too many babies during the war. He said that I had a hysterical pregnancy, that I wanted a baby so much, I was imagining being pregnant. But I knew that he was wrong, so here you are.”
“Did it hurt?” I ask.
“Did what hurt?”
“When I came out,” I answer impatiently.
“Sure it hurt.”
“How bad?”
“Bad enough for me to pass out until the pain woke me up again.” She laughs, then adds quickly, “You are worth it. I named you Eva because you are my one and only girl, after Eve, the very first woman in the world. But you were given another name as well by our neighbors, your godparents.”
“Mama, who are they?”
“They were a very religious old couple from Cluj, your father's hometown. They took us in when you were a tiny infant, when no other Hungarians would lease a room to a young Romanian woman from Bucharest with a newborn. They were childless, so they asked me to allow them to give you a name. So I did.”
“How come?”
“They were kind, good people, and it was a mitzvah.”
“What's a mitzvah?” I ask.
“Shhh, go to sleep,” she whispers. “It's a good deed, just like what they did for us.”
“What name did they give me?”
“I don't know. I let them take you to their temple, but I didn't go to the naming ceremony. They were so happy and very grateful when they returned with you.”
“Can't we call them up on the telephone and ask them my name?”
“I don't think so,” Mama answers. “Those people are long gone. They were very old.”
“You really don't remember the name that they gave me?”
“No, I don't. I'm sorry. It didn't seem to matter at the time. It was more important to just let them give you a name, to do the good deed.”
I drift off to sleep hoping that someday I will find my lost name.
BEFORE I ENTER FIRST GRADE,
I spend most afternoons jumping rope and playing hopscotch by myself in our large front yard. First, I jump rope while counting to one hundred. Then I do it again to two hundred, this time twirling the rope horizontally beneath my feet. When I am finally exhausted, I draw a hopscotch grid with white chalk on the yard's gray pavement, throw a pebble in one of the squares, and hop one-legged around the grid, alternating between winning and losing since there is no one to play with.
Next door, however, there are lots of other children. Our yard abuts a state-run orphanage, whose courtyard is at the top of a six-foot wall that separates our property from theirs. The wrought-iron fence that keeps the orphanage children from falling into our yard is topped with black arrowheads that slice the air between our two worlds. The liberated squeals of the children next door, when they are let out from what I imagine to be stone-cold corridors, sound like a flock of birds taking off. The boys and girls are about my age, and they wear gray checkered uniforms. The boys' hair is cut so short, you can see their scalps. My mother claims it's for protection
against head lice, but all the girls have shoulder-length hair just like mine, except theirs is pulled back with white headbands, while mine is kept off my forehead with a bobby pin.
The day is overcast. The orphan kids next door are out in the yard. Their shrill voices are jarring, but I ignore them and go about my usual routine—jumping rope and playing hopscotch. When I tire, I lean against the wall and gaze up across the yard to watch the other children. They're standing in a circle, clapping and singing a familiar Romanian nursery rhyme, while a boy runs around the outer perimeter of the circle waving a white handkerchief: “Mi'am pierdut o batistu
a, m
bate m
mica, cine are s
mio deie, îi s
rut
guri
a
.—I've lost my little hankie, Mama's going to beat me, whoever finds it and returns it, I'll reward with a kiss on the mouth.” The boy drops the hankie behind one of the girls' backs. She swishes around to pick it up, her braids flying above her head, but a breeze breaks the heavy stillness of the air and floats the hankie down into our yard. All of their eyes are suddenly upon me. “Pick it up! Pick it up!” they shout in unison, clutching their hands into fists around the black bars of the fence.
I press my back against the yard wall and feel its hardness as I glance at the white patch of cotton that has just landed at my feet. I don't know what to do. “Pick it up, and bring it back!” the girl with the braids screeches. I step forward into the hopscotch grid on my right foot, my left leg dangling in the air. I bend down and retrieve the white handkerchief just as if I were picking up a hopscotch pebble. I break into a run out of our yard and stop abruptly by the orphanage gate. I wait for the boy to come and retrieve his handkerchief, but instead he pulls me into their yard, right into the middle of their circle. “She's it! She's it!” he cries.
“You've got to kiss
her
!” All the orphan kids are singing at the top of their lungs and twirling around me so fast that I cannot see straight. My ears are pounding as the boy plants a big, wet kiss on my cheek before I grab my jump rope and run breathlessly home.
 
AFTER THE HANDKERCHIEF INCIDENT, I try to ignore the kids next door, but the girl with the braids does not ignore me. One day, after the others have gone inside, she stays behind and places her face between the fence bars.
“What's your name? Mine is Eugenia,” she volunteers.
“Eva,” I answer, not wanting to continue the conversation.
“That's pretty,” she says without taking her eyes off my jump rope.
“Uh-huh,” I mumble.
“Can I test your jump rope?”
I really don't feel like sharing, but I go to the wall and throw my rope up through the fence bars. Eugenia catches it and starts to jump as if she's been doing it her whole life.
“Can you keep count for me?” she yells breathlessly.
I count to one hundred and Eugenia isn't even breaking a sweat. At one fifty she stops abruptly and throws back my rope.
“Thank you very much,” she says, running into the orphanage building.
I wonder how come no one seems to have missed her all this time. I bet if she were living at home with her family someone would have noticed that she was gone, the way my mother and Grandpa Yosef did when I went off by myself to the park.
“Grandpa,” I ask at breakfast the next day, “why are the children next door orphans?”
“Because their parents are either dead or not able to care for them,” Grandpa answers, looking at me.
“Right. But why?”
“Why?” Grandpa considers my question while fogging his reading glasses and wiping them with the corner of his shirt. “Sometimes parents die and there are no other family members who can take the child in,” he says, placing his glasses, which are still somewhat greasy, back on the tip of his nose. He scrutinizes me above their frames. “Other times the parents are alive and want to care for their child very much, but they can't.”
“Why can't they?”
Grandpa looks tired. “I don't know. Circumstances dictate the situation.”
“What circumstances? What does circumstances mean?”
“It's just another way of saying life, what happens in life, Eva. Suppose both parents are ill or …” Grandpa sighs.
“Or?”
“Or in jail.”
“Why would they ever go to jail, unless they were really bad people?” I ask, swinging my legs under the table.
“Not everyone who goes to jail is a bad person.” Grandpa looks straight at me, and my legs stop swinging automatically.
“Did you ever know anyone who went to jail who wasn't a bad person?”
“Of course.” Grandpa smiles.
“Who?”
“I've been in jail, Eva, and so have many other innocent people.”
“But why?”
“Because people who are in power don't always do the right thing.”
“Oh” is all that I say because now my mind is racing back to Eugenia, whose braids fly in the air while she skips across the orphanage yard and who can jump rope to over one hundred and fifty counts. I wish I knew why she lives in the orphanage, but I'm afraid to ask. Are both her parents dead? Or are they rotting in some Communist jail, living only for the moment they can come home to reclaim their daughter? What will happen to Eugenia if the Party decides that her parents are guilty?

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