#3 Remembering x2

Trains

I remember the first time we (me, my parents, my sister) got on the train to Bucharest. It was 1970 and we were in Romania for a year. My father had the first ever Fulbright lectureship at the University of Iasi, far east, in Moldovia. I remember the smell of the coal in the air from the locomotive and the sound of the whistle. The train for Bucharest leaves Iasi around 11pm and it takes until 6 or 7am to get to the Gare d’Est.

[Flash to 2017: the other week when I was killing time in Sacramento between Amtrak’s California Zephyr and the Northern Flyer I went to the train museum. There was a car just like the sleepers on the Bucharest train. Painted darkish green and the toilet was right around the bend of the last compartment in the rear of the car. The doors had handles that push down, just like any European door, and there was dark wood and curved windows.]

The last time I rode the Bucharest train was in 1999, going to Iasi for the first visit since we drove out of town in May 1971. Dad maneuvered our dark green Volvo around the ox carts, heading south through Bulgaria to Greece. I was on my way to Iasi because I’d been invited to be a judge for a choreography festival/competition. I didn’t sleep well. The bunk was hard and I was sharing the couchette with a choreographer from England who I was tired of being with, although we’d been friendly all evening wandering around, pulling our suitcases and looking for a café until we found one across from the station and camped out there for several hours, drinking Turkish coffee and mineral water.

Around 6am we pulled into the much smaller than I remembered but still vaulted and echoey Iasi station, the station that lies at the bottom of Iasi’s many hills. As a kid I would hear the train whistle and turn around at the top of Sanda’s street to watch the steam from the locomotives floating up into the completely dark sometimes starry sky. I remember the smell of brown coal and wood fires and pigs in the garbage at the street corners and garlic and sweat and old dirt and trees and wool and tsuica in the early morning wafting out of cafes where men drank and ate smoked bacon fat and chain smoked cigarettes.

I imagined that the train went a lot of places. That it could take you to Russia or Vienna. I knew it went to Ploesti. But we only took the train to Bucharest and once to Sinaia, for New Years.

My memories? All over the place. I have a feeling of being carried. Taken along the way that a train carries you into tunnels and out again, darkness and sun and having to wait for reasons that are not clear. I remember the festival day on the Piata Uniri and the smell of the drunk man in peasant clothes who was putting his hand on my 10-year-old ass. Sliding into 30 years later and the sweated-in old clothes smell of the farmers kneeling on the floor of a carved-like-lace wooden church in a mountain monastery in Bukovina, my urban host weaving his way through them, not caring they were praying to St. George. Clean and better-fed, aristocrat amongst the serfs. A pair of old hands skinny with starvation, men in lambskin vests over cheap sweatshirts and wearing broken plastic shoes send me back to 1970 and lambskin over hand woven linen and embroidery, shoes of stiff decorated leather curling up over the toes.

After checking into the not-there-in-1970 hotel I take a walk, finding my way uphill to the music school. There are a group of Roma ladies selling carnations; I remember the first snowdrops of 1971 held out in brown, broken-fingernailed hands, weak sun shining on pale and blotchy yellow plaster walls. It’s October 1999 and I feel the coming winter cold, even sitting in the sun drinking last year’s wine. I walk down Sanda’s street and see a house I think might have been hers. I look through the high iron gate but the rows of grapes, the hanging peppers, the apple trees, the pigs and chickens all gone. The street is filled with newer buildings, houses like Staten Island mafia on a small scale, surrounded by walls against which there were other walls built of bits of tin and old boards.

1970. I watch men in blue cotton work clothes frame out buildings jerry rigged of miscellaneous small branches and trunks and bits of wood. Walls then covered with plaster and whitewashed and blue washed, blue up to the height of my shoulders, white above. And stenciled. Benches built into the wall on the sunny side and windows of odd angles and shapes lurching out of the plaster, deep deep into the thick walls. Smoke escaping from the small chimneys. Pale light and pale walls and pale blue and pale lemon yellow and pale faces and snow on fading brown dirt. The miracle of spring onions and radishes on the bare splintery boards of the market stalls. The church walls radiating bright yellow under the budding lime trees.