MY FATHER'S ROMANIA

1933-1969

One

It was your turn to make the rounds.

Kerosene lamp in hand,

boots strapped to your feet,

rain dappled your back.

You fingered your thin hair, spread it across your skull.

You walked the path along along a field,

moon glistened in the eyes of cattle,

just before they fell asleep.

You reached one of the dormitories,

slowly opened the wooden door,

falling from its hinges.

This place could not easily be called a prison,

without some type of disbelief:

disbelief in god,

disbelief in your country,

disbelief in yourself.

Inside, beds lined the walls,

bunked atop each other;

mattresses stuffed with dry grass,

the dull odor of a dead season   

each time a man twisted his body in uneasy sleep.

In the middle of the room,

a few men huddled- men your grew up with,

whose vaporous faces, damp in the back of your thoughts,

startled when you peered in.

What are you doing?

They played dice, tossed them against a crate.

Sounded like a pair of teeth

whose owner had been long dead.

They bet their shoes, their belts, a hat.

They feared you would betray them.

To set them at ease, you joined in on a game,

lost your only pair of socks,

and earned their trust for ever.

Two

Four years spent in the camps

counting heart beats, thinking of

Octave, your brother the violinist.

Vivaldi, your childhood dog,

disappeared for six months,

but returned, remembered

his way back home to you,

coarse fur stretched across his ribs.

Your hands held everything

Ceausescu refused to touch.

His wife paraded around like a scientist.

Brick by brick, you broke apart

and reassembled your country,

plucked filthy tomatoes from its fields,

pinched maggots from your soup,

contracted malaria,

witnessed first hand how small pools of blood

and puddles of turbid water are the same,

evaporating under the summer sun.

You worked for cigarettes, food, soap,

garments issued from the last man

who didn't need them anymore;

the stench of his sweat

emanated from the stitching.

It is now thirty-one years after defection,

after medical school,

after Austria, after Manhattan,

after the tumor that took your mother,

the depression that took your father,

after your brother strung his last weeping song-

the camps often whisper in your ear, tickling your lobe

with the sincerity of wind,

remembering your name,

you, refusing to remember theirs.