Lullabies for Old Ladies

By Vera Varga

The thirteen short stories show the life and challenges of a group of Romanian and Romanian Jew friends after they escape Romania of Ceausescu. Their destinies brought them first to Israel and subsequently to Canada or USA. The main characters are Dan and Vera, a couple struggling to come to terms with immigration, assimilation, and with Dans mild borderline personality disorder. Veras struggle to keep the balance in life and the sanity in her family as a first-generation immigrant is also shown. The stories are fiction inspired by real life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 18, 2015
• ISBN: 9781503593817

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Copyright © 2015 by Vera Varga.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2015912790

ISBN:   Hardcover   978-1-5035-9383-1

   Softcover   978-1-5035-9382-4

   eBook   978-1-5035-9381-7

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 09/14/2015

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

1 Maya’s Garden

2 Snow and Sand

3 The Elevator

4 The Office

5 The Morning Traffic

6 Pot and Religion

7 The Way Home

8 The poem

9 Coliva

10 The Good Parents

11 Greek Blue

12 Forty years reunion

13 Borderline Love

Everyone thinks writers must know more about the inside of the human head, but that is wrong. They know less, that’s why they write. Trying to find out what everyone else takes for granted.

—Margaret Atwood

At the end, we all become stories.

—Margaret Atwood

1

Maya’s Garden

I prepared the coffee myself, and I found it stale. It’s a sunny Saturday, not hot yet. This summer is as hot and sticky as an Israeli summer. I tend to prefer the indoors, always choosing our tiny family room located under the stairs, where the only window is a two-by-two-meter painting of an open window facing a beach, half covered by a transparent curtain floating in the breeze. I probably cannot stand the hot, humid summers because of my compulsive smoking. I accumulated how many years already? Twenty to twenty-five?

Petru is not home, and our cat Grace is following me for a change. I take my coffee and go to the far end of our rather long backyard, a standard backyard for the old streets around Yonge Street, viewed by many as Toronto’s backbone, north of 401. The backyard is like a Japanese garden. As a joke, Petru now calls me Maya, my geisha instead of Maya, my shiksa. Do I look like a geisha? A sophisticated prisoner of a Japanese garden?

Maybe he is right. I am alone and here it is quiet. I am sitting on the stone garden bench and Vlad’s shadow is curving around me. I want to escape the feeling. I am trying to imagine how Emily, my lost friend from our previous life in Haifa, is doing. I heard that she has two boys with her Palestinian lover Nasser and they are living in California. Time flies. She has two kids; I have none.

Maybe it’s for the best because Petru remains my only love. Petru didn’t change much over the years; he is the same handsome, charming, and talented boy with blue eyes from Bucharest University that I met in the seventies. Our life without a kid is like a breeze. We are floating from vacation to vacation; we are free and content. I rarely have time to regret that there are only two of us. Petru is sometimes a big baby or a late teen anyhow—changing, unstable, erratic, not focused. He is my lion (born in August), but now he is more of a wounded lion.

Here, in the shadow of my neighbor’s maple tree, not really in sync with my Japanese garden, I feel better. Like a geisha, I am strong headed, determined, and hardworking. Geisha life is not easy; she has to entertain night and day. Even my complexion is of a geisha’s complexion; I have tiny bones, a pale face, strong jaws, and black eyes.

Petru is away for a week for filming. He is not easy to live with when nothing is going right in his acting career—no musical roles in view, only a few secondary roles in big-buck Hollywood movies. He is getting frustrated in being cast as a Russian spy or a hit man in every movie. His last offer was to play a pilot in a documentary film about a plane accident. But what should I expect from a lion?

Last night, I watched again The Unbelievable Lightness of Being … and again, I couldn’t help but compare the characters to us—me, Petru and Emily. I don’t remember reading the book in Israel, even if all of us were taken by Milan Kundera.

Emily and I were good friends. We clicked as soon as we met, maybe because our mothers were friends when they were young, way back in the fifties, in Communist Romania, or maybe because she was reliable and determined like me. She arrived in Israel after me, alone, at twenty-four. She was Jewish. I admired her for being independent and courageous. Such a step is not easy to do alone: you have to go through the humiliation of being demoted at work, to be denigrated in front of your colleagues and labeled a traitor, to go through hell to get a passport, to select from your house the items you cannot leave behind. She was a strong woman. When she started dating my best friend Vlad, I was happy for them and our friendship grew stronger.

Vlad was working at Hevrata Hashmal (Israeli Electrical Utility), and Emily started a master’s degree in Technion, Haifa Technical Institut. They married in a hurry, in August 1982, only two months after they moved in together. I admired them for their decision because Petru took many years before asking me to marry him. But again, Emily was Jewish. I was a shiksa, and Vlad was not Petru. Vlad wanted constantly to please everybody; Petru wanted constantly to challenge every man in view. For Petru, life was like a play; for Vlad, life was serious and engaging. Vlad took the marriage very seriously, trying all the time to surprise Emily. I noticed that he was constantly asking permission to do things on his own. He tried occasionally to open up to me about how to make Emily happy, but I used to brush him off saying that he will find a way.

Come on, Vlad! Give me a break! Do the obvious. You are in love, I used to say, not really getting why he is concerned.

After a while, I started avoiding him. We were very good friends, but I didn’t want Petru to imagine I was his confidant. On top of it, we were too busy applying at the Canadian Embassy for landed immigrant status, and it is not an easy task to gather all the papers. We wanted to get out of Israel, and we got the approval pretty fast. We celebrated the event at Vlad and Emily’s new place, a big apartment with a nice view of Neve Shannaan Vady, with our group of friends.

We were taken by surprise when we got the acceptance in less than a year. When I look back, I can understand why this happened. Petru was not a good asset for Medinat Yisrael after childishly running away from the army two years prior to our decision to leave Israel.

The army service in Israel is three years for boys and two years for girls. The olim hadashim (immigrants) get some exemption based on their age of arrival in Israel. If you are studying, your army service is postponed during your study period, which is limited to a realistic period. Petru was taking a master’s degree in Technion, permitting him maximum of two years to finish. If you don’t finish in time, too bad—you go to the army. The problem is that when you come from a Communist country where life is simple, well-planned, and without surprises, it is very difficult for a twenty-three-year-old man, and especially for Petru, to readjust to a new country, where you are suddenly free and in a new education system with an abundance of choices and a tough American schedule.

After the first year of studying, Petru completely lost control in this colorful country—eight months of sun and beaches, a new culture to discover, new people to know. As an Ashkenazi Jew from Romania, he was fascinated by his people coming from everywhere, so different but still as Jewish or even more Jewish than him. I suspect he needed some roots, and I was, lucky me, the only Romanian root that can keep him grounded. He felt alone and lost in his own country. He came back to Romania to marry me. He felt out of place in Haifa. I came to the rescue, but it was too late when I arrived. The process of leaving Romania was long and painful. He had to go to the army. Instead, he tried to escape when everybody knew nobody escapes the Israeli army.

I don’t know why he did it. Maybe he wanted to protest against the Israeli rules for olim hadashim or wanted to be famous. Maybe he wanted to test the justice system in a free country or wanted to impress me. I took it as a game. When Petru decided to escape the enrollment, I was two months pregnant and working for one month at Hevrata Hasmal. For three weeks he kept changing houses and sleeping every night at another friend’s place—in maon (dorm) Hanita, in maon Technion, in maon Neve Shaanan. All our friends were studying, staying in dormitories. They all admired him for his hutzpah. Finally, the army police caught him in our apartment, where he came to change his clothes. He spent two days in a military jail in Carmel, and after that, he did his military service as a math teacher, also in Carmel, very close to home. The first night in jail, he asked for his childhood cakes, savarina and cremshnit, but he couldn’t eat because his hands were handcuffed. I had to feed him through the bars. I didn’t know if I should have laughed at or cried for my big baby. Seeing him eating like a convict, I decided I would not keep the baby. It was not the right time.

It was not the first abortion. I had two back in Romania. The first one was made on a kitchen table by a butcher; the second one was arranged by Petru’s parents in the Communist Party hospital. I experienced the two extremes of the system, the one for the poor and the one for the privileged. Now it was time to experience the Democratic medical system, and indeed, it was a nice experience—if getting rid of a baby boy, as they told me, could be a nice experience. How light I felt after the abortion, but now my soul is heavy thinking I could have had a twenty-three-year-old boy as gorgeous as his father.

In the last weeks before leaving Israel, Emily got her driver’s license. Once, while Vlad was at a club playing bridge, she invited me and Petru for a ride, a gift before our departure. What a ride! She almost killed us, taking the curves at full speed on Haifa’s steep roads on the hills. Haifa is a challenging place to drive for a lemon drive—the lemon sign on the back window is the sign for the beginners in Europe and Israel, or at least it was ten years ago. Petru and me, we were happy to survive!

We left Israel. We were the first ones among our friends to do it, four years since my arrival in Israel and a little bit more than three years working for Hevrata Hashmal, which, by the way, was one of Vlad’s mitzvah (good deed). Vlad was friends with every Romanian Jew in Israel. He was almost an establishment in finding the right job for every ole hadash (new immigrant).

When we left, Emily just started her first job at Elsint, the complex across the Dadou Beach, while Vlad was making plans to immigrate to the USA. He had as many friends in California as in Israel. Emily approved in principle, insisting to wait for two to three years to let her get some work experience.

We left Israel in May to make a smooth transfer from palms to maple trees, from sunny to chilly weather. The first six months in Toronto was a challenge. We had