How the Romanians Ruined Christmas

Carrie Messenger

In Romania, what holidays do you celebrate?

You’re sloppy interrogators, hardly like the Securitate back home. Sometimes we don't even give you our names when asked, pretend we don’t understand. For the times when the three of us have to talk, we practice what to say together, particularly what to say for Gabitza. She's too little so we have to speak for her. We tell her what she needs to remember, what to tell, and when to keep quiet.

Taticul promises us that this year in America, we'll celebrate a real Christmas, with Old Man Christmas coming instead of the communist Old Man Winter. In Romania no one has a real Christmas any more, no fir trees with candles, no boys in goat masks banging drums, no braided sweetbread full of raisins. There aren’t any raisins even if your bunica queues for days on end. They do decorate the trees in Cimisgiu Gardens, and if you have enough money you can get a picture taken standing in the snow with Old Man Winter. We had one taken when Gabitza learned to walk. We're lined up in a row oldest to youngest. See Silvica's braids lifting in the wind, see me, Cornel, balancing a snowball on each mitten for each sister, Gabitza crying as Old Man Winter squeezes her hand! We have the picture with us in America.

Besides, we're Jews. We're not supposed to celebrate Christmas but we can have New Year's, Women's Day, or National Day like everyone else. Bunica said before the war we used to have Shabbat every Friday, plus interesting holidays like Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah.

Mamica said to Bunica as they smoked in the kitchen, draga, are you crazy? Shabbat -- a day without electricity on purpose? Yom Kippur -- entirely too much fasting. They're skinny enough already. Please don't talk about such things in front of the children. The neighbors are so nosy, Ma, like you wouldn't believe.

We like that Bunica talks to us. Bunica is Mamica's mother, but you'd never guess. She's skinny and smokes, not like anybody else's bunica. When Mamica was at work, Bunica answered our questions, including the ones she's not supposed to. Bunica said, But don't tell people that we're Jewish. It's not supposed to matter, but it does matter for the university and jobs. We weren’t supposed to talk about the parties Mamica and Taticul went to at their classmates' apartments to drink brandy, play bridge, and make up rhymes about how stupid the Ceausescus are. Or that Bunicul had a wireless locked up in his bookcase that can pick up the BBC World Service, or the letters Bunica received six months late and ripped open from her cousins in Israel.

When we applied for our visas in 1987 until we got them in 1989, the Domnul from the Securitate in his trenchcoat and his Warsaw-bought double-breasted suit came to talk to Taticul once a week. Sometimes the Domnul took him away over night and Mamica waited up in the kitchen in the dark. We said, buna ziua, good day, to the Domnul and nothing else, ever, like Mamica asked. We took Gabitza out of the parlor and into the kitchen when we heard the street dogs bark and saw the Domnul striding through the courtyard with his long and careful steps, the trenchcoat billowing behind him.

Once we're in America a month after the visa came through and Taticul promises us a Christmas in December 1989, Mamica instantly realizes what the problem will be. Mamica says, God, what have you said, Octavian, you know we can't have a Christmas with the Jews coming over here almost every day. How are they going to feel after what they've done for us? What will they say when they see a tree?

Draga, we'll hide it, Taticul says. Aren't we good at hiding things? He blinks at her twice. He is highly myopic, but rarely wears his glasses.

We come from a long of line of myopics. Sometimes it's not good to let people know you have glasses. They'll know you have enough money to get them. They'll know you need them because you read too much. If you need glasses and you don't wear them, the world looks different. It blurs and you can see your way through to the end that you might want. Sometimes if you can't see someone, they can't see you, and you're safe.

In America, the teachers say we need glasses because we can't see the blackboard. They also wonder if Silvica's gotten the right things to eat in Romania. She's too short for ten. I’m all right though, at eight, stocky even, and Gabitza at five is too little so they can't tell yet.

At the synagogue the American Jews are impressed with how quiet we can be, even Gabitza, how carefully we pay attention. They don't know that in Romania, the teacher hits you if you fidget. At the synagogue door, Mamica says, draga, darlings, Silvica, Cornel, Gabitza, straighten your postures. Chin up, always. Since Nadia Comaneci, the Americans expect it of us. Particularly these American Jews. Don't forget how much they did for us, to get us here. None of your snot-nosed ways from home. Let's just say I'd like your naughtiness to stay in Bucharest where it belongs.

Do you have any pets?

We think we belong in Bucharest with Bogdan, our favorite street dog who kept the other street dogs away from us when we played in the courtyard. Bogdan isn't the biggest, but he's crazy when he fights so the other dogs stay away from him. All the dogs in our neighborhood had stiff, tawny fur and yellow eyes.

Bunica used to joke, I don't know how you children can tell which is the dog you think is yours. They're all vagabonds. We knew Bogdan right away because he only had one eye. He let Gabitza pet him, but nobody else. Gabitza sat in the courtyard on the steps with her arms draped around his thick neck and he didn't mind. His stubby tail wagged, and he looked almost for a minute like a pet instead of a stray, none of his wildness in his yellow, unblinking eye. But if somebody else tried to pet him, he'd snap at you, even if you gave him a piece of bread dipped in soup first. If someone tried to get too close to Gabitza, he growled low in his throat and his eye rolled back into his head.

We couldn't take Bogdan. Taticul told us, you can't take a dog on an airplane. And we'll have an apartment in America, not a villa in the country. Really, do you think we'll be in Chicago and, poof, then we're rich? Besides, he isn't even our dog. Someone else in the building will look after him.

Where do you live?

But we don't get to go to Chicago. The Jews from the synagogue who sponsored our visas live just outside of Chicago in the Village of Skokie, Illinois. Skokie is the worst place we've ever seen. It's not the city, but it's not the country either, and it's like no village we've ever been to. It's nothing like the village where Bunicul grew up. No one has chickens or cows and there are no meadows or forests to play in. There is a small yard with weeds in one corner and dog shit in another, and some anemic evergreen bushes growing next to the house. There is only one other family in our Skokie building, the Goldsteins, who walk us over to the synagogue on Shabbat.

In Bucharest, our courtyard ran the length of a city block. The courtyard was covered in layers of dust that blew in the wind, but where the cement cracked along the edges people grow flowers. We never had to play with each other because there were so many kids, plus Bogdan. Gabitza has got a matted clump of his fur in her pocket that she hides from Mamica.

The Goldsteins say the building is called a two-flat. The two-flats are little, squat and pink, built in a brick that is almost the same pink as the Skokie sky is at night. Taticul tells us the electric lights make the sky pink. We think, what a waste to try and light up the sky itself. How very American. Gabitza worries the pink sky will catch on fire and Mamica has to pull Gabitza onto her lap to quiet her. Gabitza sticks her hands deep into her pocket.

Mamica isn't being as careful about housekeeping in Skokie, otherwise she would have found the fur in Gabitza's pocket and fast, too. She says America makes her bone-weary, even though in Bucharest she taught algebra at the high school and in Skokie she doesn't do anything but wait for us to come home from school and then for Taticul to come home from the hospital where he works as an orderly.

Taticul says in America, maybe his children will be doctors. Mamica and Taticul like science because the answers stay true no matter who is in the government. That is, until Elena Ceausescu began to pretend to study chemistry and Romanian scientists had to pretend to believe she was a great genius or lose their jobs. In Romania, Taticul was a scientist before we were born but lost his job because of his myopic-style politics and became an electrician instead. He wants to become an electrician in Chicago. The perfect job for the myopic man, he says.

Mamica can't teach here because she doesn't know English. She knows French, German and Russian. She props an English textbook open next to the sink when she does the dishes. Most of the time, she waits in the kitchen smoking and looking out the window, even though Taticul asks her to sit in the living room in front of the picture window when he comes home from the hospital. She wears a checkered housecoat all day, taking slow drags of her cigarettes, scratching at her hennaed hair as she thinks. We think Mamica is beautiful, with her black hair dyed dark red and her aquiline nose, high nostrils flaring at everything Taticul says these days.

The living room. That’s where the living is supposed to happen, draga, he tells her. The picture window is for looking out, pretty as a picture onto this wide street. The Goldsteins wonder why you don't sit on the loveseat with the floral print that they went to such trouble to arrange for us.

Maybe they shouldn't have troubled, she says. Maybe you shouldn't trouble me, either.

Gabitza barks to stop them from fighting. Taticul gathers her up and places her on his shoulders. What's this? he says. A beautiful little girl, or a beautiful little puppy? They run around the apartment, crashing into the rest of us, barking. We, all three of us, collapse onto the floral loveseat and tickle Taticul. Mamica smokes another cigarette in the kitchen and flips through the pages of her English book. She leaves ashy thumbprints.

What's your name, little girl?

More and more, Gabitza is barking instead of talking. At the school, they think the barking is Romanian. Ham ham ham, says Gabitza. The teacher says American dogs say bow-wow, but when we listen to the American dogs as we walk home from school we still hear ham, ham. We hear the dogs, but we can't find them. They live locked up in people's yards and don't go out on the street to play with children. Gabitza sticks her fingers through fences to pet the dogs even though Mamica told her not to. Her hand is so little that if she balls it into a fist, she can stick it through the chain links. The dogs sniff her fingers and lick them. She rubs the spot where their floppy ears meet their heads. These dogs are Labradors, terriers, retrievers, the fancy dogs we can't have until we're rich like the Americans.

No one can spell our names. Gabitza's name in Romania didn't have a zed, it's Gabita with a t with a tail, Gabitza's favorite letter because you can draw it to look like a puppy, but the teachers say we have to add the zed so people can pronounce it properly. Silvica and I learn the new alphabet quickly, but Gabitza hasn't learned the Romanian alphabet perfectly yet so the new alphabet is hard for her. They want Silvica to spell her name, Sylvia, and to drop the diminutive. I have a girl's name. You start calling me Cornelia and then Nelly instead of Cornel. Apparently Nelly is the name for a mean girl with fat yellow ringlets in the book Little House on the Prairie. At my recess, I have to hit you when you call me Nelly. The teacher makes me take times out to cool down. It’s cold outside and I can see my breath growing in front of me as I wait.

Silvica is in trouble, too. She can draw so that things look real, but she can't draw from her imagination, only from her memory. She can't draw a monster from Where the Wild Things Are or Lincoln's log cabin, even when the teacher puts the picture on the board to copy. The teacher makes her skip recess until she can draw a Wild Thing dancing with Honest Abe.

Gabitza bites into another kindergartner's parka at the kindergarten recess. They call us out of our classes to calm her down. The parka lies on the chair in the principal's office. It's blood red with a pattern of lacy snowflakes scattered across the quilting. A piece of the lining fluff is stuck in Gabitza's teeth. I'm Bogdan, she says, in Romanian so only we can understand. She says, You must address me as Bogdan now and not Gabitza. There is no little girl here.

Draga, we call Gabitza. Draga, darling, dear, it's going to be okay. But the other kids think we're calling Gabitza a dragon. You think she's a dragon, she thinks she's a dog, the teachers think she's very bad indeed.

We get a letter from Bunica and Bunicul. Draga Gabitza, Bogdan is living in our courtyard. We feed him and he sits by our entryway door. Gabitza doesn't believe it. She tells Mamica that Bogdan climbed to the top of our building and jumped off the roof in grief, calling ham ham as he fell.

When Taticul comes home, Mamica tells him about Gabitza biting the parka, about the letter, about Gabitza ham hamming. They talk softly in the kitchen. They come sit on the loveseat and talk loudly about the Christmas tree. Taticul says, We'll have little electric lights everywhere, like the Americans do.

How will we pay for it? asks Mamica.

Draga, this is America. Power is cheap as air. Besides, it's Christmas.

What games did you play at home? What games do you play now?

In Bucharest, I played football in the courtyard. In Skokie, what you call football is a game so dangerous that players wear armor. It's forbidden at recess so you play something called kickball with rules between baseball and football, and something called dodgeball, which has no rules. I spend recess when no one calls me Nelly running around the field, kicking my real football from home, a gift from Bunica and Bunicul because we were leaving. Here, such balls are called soccer and only rich boys play. During the lunch recess, we all play this soccer together, just the three of us, even after it snows. Gabitza is goalie.

In Bucharest, I shared a football with the other boys as we ran up and down the courtyard. The girls played Going to Warsaw and My Baby's Sick What Can You Give Me? Gabitza tried to teach Bogdan to write. She traced the alphabet into the courtyard dust with his paw. When it was winter and dark inside, Silvica used a candle to read Bunica's forbidden art book on Chagall. While Silvica drew pictures by candlelight, I worked on my football teams, made up of pictures cut out from the newspaper of players from Dinamo and Steaua. Gabitza sat at the window and watched Bogdan. She begged Mamica to let Bogdan in the apartment.

Never, Gabitza draga, said Mamica. Do you think we're rich, to have a dog in the house?

When it was dark in the winter, when the house was cold and we had to put on both our best and second best sweater and maybe our mittens when we sat in the kitchen, we helped Mamica cook. You haven't asked yet about what we eat. In Bucharest and in Skokie, we eat borscht and stuffed cabbage and fried potatoes and pork cutlets and mamaliga. Pork cutlets are something we must keep from the Skokie Jews, especially when we have it for supper on Shabbat. Mamaliga is cornmeal cooked with water and stirred. You have to be strong to stir it. It tastes better with milk and butter. In Bucharest, we had it with milk and butter on birthdays. In Skokie, we have it with milk all the time. It isn't even special any more.

In Bucharest, when the queues were long and we had to stand outside with Bunica for hours on the icy sidewalks, when the rationing levels got bad and we were always a little bit hungry, we played Maybe There's Something Besides a Potato on My Plate, Guess What I Found in My Borscht?, and Something Funny Happened in the Toilet Paper Queue.

Sometimes, when Bunica sent us home and queued alone because it was too cold, and we waited in the apartment for Bunica, Bunicul, Mamica and Taticul, we played a game called Mamica's Never Coming Back. Gabitza would ask, When is Mamica coming back? and we chanted, Mamica is never coming back. It's just us, forever and ever. We laughed when she cried. She would run outside to sit with Bogdan until Mamica came home. We watched her from the window and tried to lure her back in with a cup of tea with extra sugar, a picture of a dog that Silvica will draw for her, permission to play with my paper teams, but Gabitza stayed with Bogdan. Bogdan would growl at us when we tried to pry her off of him and drag her in.

Whenever she came back, Mamica would be cross that we let Gabitza outside but would make tea for all of us. Silvica would make a picture for Gabitza, and I wouldn't mind when Gabitza ripped Dinamo's midfielder the slightest bit. After the Domnul took away Taticul for the first time, we never played that game again, because now we know it's true that someone can never come back.

When will the revolution start in your country?

As the changes begin in Europe in 1989, the teachers ask us and the Jews at the synagogue ask Mamica and Taticul this question. You don't ask us; kids don't care. The closer we get to Christmas, it becomes clearer that the Romanians might do something that will ruin Christmas.

When school lets out for the winter holidays, we start a new game. We stand outside in the small yard, yelling, Down with the Goldsteins! instead of Down with the Ceausescus! The Goldsteins are at work so they don't mind, but Mamica minds.

She says, Do you want to suggest that this nice family who has done nothing but help us are dictators? What's the matter with you?

As soon as she goes back inside, we start again. She doesn't call us inside to play because she has a headache and wants to be alone in the bedroom with the shades drawn and a washcloth over her eyes. She tells us we need the fresh December air. We pretend that the yard is the central square in Timisoara. We take turns being the jailed Hungarian priest. The chain-links are our prison bars. We wrap our mittened hands around the links.

When Taticul is home, he listens to National Public Radio. He translates for Mamica. When the Ceausescus flee from the Central Committee Building in a helicopter on December 22, the Goldsteins tell us it's going to be on television on the evening news. Mr. Goldstein says, Isn't it exciting to watch the changes in your country?

The television feed from Romania is grainy but we can see the gray buildings in the snow and the people huddled together on the streets in fur hats. The Central Committee Building isn't so far from Cimisgiu Gardens. Gabitza asks if we will see Bunica, Bunicul and Bogdan. Romania is shown for seven minutes. We sit together on the loveseat, no one wanting to be the one to turn off the television.

When Taticul calls Bunica and Bunicul, he can't get through but there's a click on the line which means the Securitate is listening. We ask if it's the Domnul. Taticul says, We're in Skokie now. Don't think about these things. Don't think about the Domnul. Just think about Bunica and Bunicul, walking in Cimisgiu Gardens hand in hand.

We figure out how to use the fire escapes to climb to the roof of the two-flat when Mamica goes to the store. We use a ladder from the Goldsteins' toolshed to pull the fire escapes down with our own weight. There isn't much of a view up on the two-flat but Gabitza counts the dogs she can see in the yards. We make sure she doesn't stand too close to the gutters. We draw matches to see who gets to be Ceausescu. Gabitza wins. She wants someone to be Elena Ceausescu with her, but we say then there won't be enough people to shout down below. We use the matches to melt the ice off the edges of the fire escape steps. We climb down and stomp in the snow while Gabitza waves at us and squints at the sun. She's to wave her arms above her like a helicopter and disappear from view down the fire escape. Then she'll join us and we'll all cheer together, take a walk to a pretend Cimisgiu Gardens in the back of the yard, eat pretend cakes made of real sugar poured into snow. We'll be done before Mamica gets home.

But Gabitza won't come down, and she kicks at the ladder until it falls in the snow in front of us. When we try to put it back up, she throws snowballs at us and threatens to drop icicles on our heads. All along, she's barking and saying, Down with Silvica and Cornel! Down with Skokie! Ham ham ham.

As the sky across Skokie turns pink and the little white lights on the houses for Christmas and the blue lights for Hanukah in the homes of the Jews go on, as the neighborhood dogs bark and race along their fences responding to Gabitza's call, as Mamica is approaching the front door and Mrs. Goldstein's car is entering the garage, down Gabitza goes, like a dive, like she's performing a trick.

She lands in the snowy, scraggly evergreen bushes. Mamica screams and runs. We run, too, to see our sister splayed out across the bushes as Mamica squats down to touch her forehead. Gabitza’s eyes flutter open. Her corduroy pants have ripped through and some of the blood on her scraped knee leaks on to the snow to make it sickly pink. Her right ankle is bent back beneath her and she howls as Mamica pokes it. It’s sprained, Mamica whispers as she gathers Gabitza up. Not broken. Gabitza yawns and settles back into Mamica's arms.

We were playing Ceausescu, we tell Mamica breathlessly.

Good god, what's with you? It's bad enough what Ceausescu does to your Bunica and your Bunicul but you decide to do it to your little sister?

No, no, Mamica, you don't understand. Gabitza was Ceausescu. She flew down by helicopter.

Mamica looks at us like we are crazy. Do you know, she says, what's real any more and what isn't?

Mrs. Goldstein has come in through the garage. Is everything all right? she asks.

Okay, okay, all okay, Mrs. Goldstein, Mamica tells her in English. Her pronunciation is terrible. If she went to the school, the kids would laugh.

Mrs. Goldstein smiles, that toothy American smile everyone at the synagogue and at the school uses. She says, That little one's simply got too much energy. Let's see about getting her into classes at the J.

When we're back in the apartment, Mamica yells, I knew it was just a matter of time before the Americans tried to turn you into gymnasts. Too much energy! How could anyone have too much energy! Get me the iodine. The iodine turns Gabitza's knee a crusty dark green. She sits on the loveseat and gets to watch what she wants, ice on her ankle wrapped in a dishtowel. She flips through the channels looking for dogfood commercials.

Taticul brings home a tree, smuggling it in his overcoat so the Goldsteins won't see. It's a small tree, what they call an apartment tree, Gabitza's size. The branches are much fuller than the ones in Bucharest and it doesn't smell much. It can't be fir. Mamica puts it in a bucket of water next to the television. Taticul arranges the cord with little lights he purchased at the pharmacy. When he plugs the lights in, Gabitza claps. Silvica draws pictures of Bogdan, Bunica and Bunicul to put on the tree. She draws the courtyard in Bucharest and the two-flat in Skokie and lets Gabitza hang them with paper clips. I hang my favorite football players from Dinamo on the tree. Mamica tucks the photograph of us in Cimisgiu Gardens between some needles. She rearranges the little bulbs around it to make a frame of lights.

We turn off all the lights but the tree lights. We sit on the loveseat and look at the tree while we drink our tea. No one wants to sing. The songs O Brad Frumos and O Christmas Tree are the same song, we learned in school. Of course they are, Mamica says, it's a German song, O Tannenbaum. She wants to sing it in German but nobody else does. We don't know any Romanian carols. We couldn't learn them in Bucharest. The poems we know about Old Man Winter seem babyish now. At school in Skokie, we learned O Hanukah O Hanukah Come Light the Menorah, but Mamica and Taticul don't know it. The word for circle dance, the hora, is the same for Romanians and Jews.

Taticul turns on the television. We watch a program about poorly-drawn orphans with a beagle who buy a scraggly Christmas tree. They love it so much it grows. Gabitza asks if it will happen to our tree, and Mamica tells her to hush. Look, Gabitza, we have a nice tree, the tree your father got for us, truly a Brad Frumos here in our new country.

Mamica takes us to pick up our new glasses. She makes us talk to the optometrist. We have to translate for her. We complain that because she won't talk, our frames are hideous, bulky and plastic. We will never wear them. The American children will never like us now that they can call us Four Eyes. Besides, we don't want to be marked myopic like this. Mamica walks us home all along Dempster Road, the cars speeding past us, without saying anything to us at all. Gabitza's nose is running, but no one stops to wipe it. We want a car like the Americans, a new one, a BMW, a Ferrari, a Ford, Chevrolet. We're tired of waiting for the bus in the snow and the cold.

When Taticul comes home, he says, Why, what has happened to you, my little owlets? Now you look like your parents and grandparents. We tell him we have decided to wear the glasses inside the apartment. We like being able to see each individual needle on the Christmas tree for the first time without standing so close it pokes us. We didn't know that other people could see so much. But Silvica says she plans to take off her glasses when she draws, me, when I play soccer, and Gabitza when she talks to dogs.

Christmas morning Gabitza wakes everyone up in turn by kissing us on both cheeks. Silvica pours the tea while Mamica fries up the pork cutlets for breakfast. I turn on the tree. Gabitza waltzes through the rooms of the apartment while Taticul brings out the presents. An American football for me. Aquarelles for Silvica. A stuffed dog for Gabitza. Gabitza says it doesn't smell real but is softer than Bogdan. New clothes for everyone, because now we are so plump. Mamica gives Taticul a tie and Taticul gives Mamica a scarf. We laugh because they are almost the same pattern, white polka dots on a field of blue. Like the night sky, Mamica says.

The school has kept us busy making many gifts. We have Silvica's clay ashtray, my reindeer ornament made from clothespins, and Gabitza's macaroni necklace for Mamica. Taticul gets a rock paperweight from Silvica, my Christmas tree bookmark, and plaster of Paris with Gabitza's hand pressed in. Silvica gives us a drawing with Old Man Winter in Cimisgiu Gardens, like the photograph but in color. The snow looks wet and cold and everything shimmers as if it's just about to move. I promise to beat up American boys if they tease my sisters. I’ve drawn up a contract. Gabitza has snowmen sugar cookies that she’s saved from school. They’re slightly stale and have crumbled in the napkin she kept them in.

We are still admiring our presents when Mr. Goldstein knocks on the door. The cutlets are still frying, the Christmas tree is still on in the living room. Mamica hisses at Taticul, What happens when the Goldsteins come up, see the tree, smell the pork cutlets? I run to turn off the tree and Silvica turns off the burner and sticks the frying pan in the refrigerator. We are still good at hiding things.

Mr. Goldstein knocks again. News, he calls out. Turn on the television! Mamica lets him in and offers him a cup of tea. His eyebrows rise when he sees the tree, but he says nothing. He sits down on the loveseat as Taticul turns on the television.

There's been an execution. Elena and Nicolae Ceausescu have been executed by firing squad in Tirgoviste. The newsman announces that the images will be graphic. Mamica and Taticul make no move to take us out of the room, to tell us not to watch, to remind us that we are children, to tell us to take off our glasses once again and resume our myopia. The image is quick, flickering, grainy, but we know it must be bloody. We know how to resolve those grains. Now that it is in Silvica's memory, she's got something new to draw.

The monsters are dead, says Taticul.

Who will be the new monsters? Because it will be just a matter of time, says Mamica.

Mr. Goldstein says, You must be so happy. Now everything will change there, too. Maybe you can bring more of your family over, or go back if you want.

Taticul says, Yes, it's wonderful. Thank you, Goldstein, for sharing news with us. Please stay for breakfast. Bring Mrs. Goldstein.

Mr. Goldstein looks at the tree. He isn't smiling. No, I don't want to interrupt. He waves to Gabitza as he backs out the door.

Taticul says to Mamica, We really can't be so sure that everything will change. It's too quick. Too okay. It can't be okay. They whisper about a coup instead of a revolution. The helicopter escape was too convenient, this trial and execution a kangaroo court run by the army. Mamica says we're going to have some explaining to do about our tree at the synagogue. I turn on the tree again and Silvica gets the cutlets back on the stove. Taticul pours brandy for everyone, even a sip for Gabitza, and we toast the health of Bunica and Bunicul.

Viva Romania! I say.

Maybe, says Mamica. Gabitza ham hams. She asks, When are we going home? Like Mr. Goldstein said? Mamica straightens Silvica's braids and watches me put my new American football away and take out my real one so I can practice my footwork outside in the morning sun. Silvica starts to draw the execution. Her new red aquarelle is left a bloody stump when she is done.

Draga, Mamica says, pulling Taticul's arm. Draga, Octavian, it would be such a simple thing to get the children a puppy.

Carrie Messenger misses walking through Cimisgiu Gardens and finishing off a bowl of Romanian tripe soup. Her fiction has appeared in Beloit Fiction Journal, Blue Mesa Review, Cream City Review, Jabberwock Review, and Witness. Her translations from Romanian have appeared in publications including The Literary Review, Salmagundi, and the anthology Words Without Borders. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is currently working toward a PhD at the University of Chicago at Illinois.