What Happened

By Mariève Rugo

This is the story of a girl born in Bucharest, Romania, in 1934. She accumulated seven parents and lived in five countries which included Great Britain during the Blitz.. Subsequently, her grandfather, a railroad tycoon, bought a banana cargo boat to enable Marieve, her mother, and Nurse to escape war-torn Europe. After crossing the Atlantic Ocean, they immigrated through Halifax to New York City. There, Marieve went to three schools before attending Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Although she married an American and has three children, she has never escaped her sense of dislocation.

Marieve taught creative writing at several schools, including Brown University, and has previously published two books of poetry. She currently lives in Massachusetts.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jun 13, 2023
• ISBN: 9781662445729

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What Happened

MariA"ve Rugo

Copyright © 2023 Mariève Rugo

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2023

ISBN 978-1-6624-4570-5 (pbk)

ISBN 978-1-6624-4573-6 (hc)

ISBN 978-1-6624-4572-9 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

What Happened

Prologue

So Many Places to Begin

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

The Business of War

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

The Meanings of Here

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

An Ocean Between

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

About the Author

Teenagers—Olivia, Vanessa, Paul Michael

What Happened

Suppose you decided to write a story

entitled My Life. Suppose you began

with autumn, the moon's cold finger on clouds,

the scratch and silvery click of birth.

So far so good. Season and years

aren't confusing as faces, their thin fabric

of irrelevant facts. Slowly you learn

craft is no more than a knack for distortion.

Only you can decide who sits and smokes,

a carafe of red wine on a tablecloth blooming

geraniums. Does that come before or after

the woman who glistens with light on the terrace,

her white silk dress, her brown eyes ripping

through flesh? When does she turn her cheek

from your kiss? Isn't that after the tumble

of Lyon's Bookshop, the old man, damp hands,

how later you both stared away?

Look closer. Your dead lover is leaving you

to Brahms, red velvet arms, gilt cupids,

and you're alone. Only maybe it's earlier—

the skirl of the lake, the girl in a rowboat,

her lap piled with primroses. Before the woman?

After the concert? In the park where sirens

introduce evening as a slow tide of chill?

By now, you've understood: this story,

like all the others, isn't the one

you intended to write. You're not the hero.

These events never happened. Then whose life

slips out the door, runs down to the harbor,

making its first appearance? Who

is the figure alone on the breakwater

in blowing spume, as the rescuers come

just so far before they turn back?

—Mariève Rugo

All the while I carried around inside me

an elsewhere, a place of which I could not speak

because no one would know what I was talking about.

I was a displaced person… And displaced persons

are displaced not just in space but in time;

they have been cut off from their own pasts.

—Penelope Lively, Oleander, Jacaranda

Prologue

The Blitz

Out of the stream of terrifying nights, I choose one in August 1942. I am almost eight, asleep in my room about midnight when across London sirens start shrieking, some rising as others fall. Already there are faraway thumps as the suburbs of Staines and Epping begin crashing into their streets. My nurse is beside my bed in her blue dressing gown, her mackintosh over it.

In my riding clothes, aged 8

Hurry up, dear, she says in the same calm tone of voice she uses when I'm late for school and can't find my gloves.

I put on my dressing gown and my bedroom slippers, pick up Teddy, my flashlight, and the small suitcase kept beside my bed. It holds a few favorite books, my identity card, and a change of clothing.

Then we're out into the passage. I see Mummy walking toward us, wearing her mink coat over her honey-beige dressing gown, carrying her suitcase, and smoking a cigarette.

Nurse locks the door to the flat behind us, saying as she always does, Not that it will do us a lot of good if we're hit.

We begin running down the stairs to the cellar. On every floor there is a sign: Never use the lift when an air raid in is progress. Before we reach the ground floor, the batteries of anti-aircraft guns open up in Hyde Park across the road. The lights on the staircase flicker as the first high explosive bombs land close by. As always, I am bewildered by the deluge of sound. Nurse's hand grasping mine feels increasingly unreal. When we reach the cellar and its wooden benches, crowded with other tenants, a loud whistling crescendo begins, and everyone looks up to see if the ceiling is going to collapse on us. But it only shudders as the building sways, and the hot water pipes creak ominously; a nearby house has received a direct hit. We think briefly of its unknown occupants. I wonder if they had any cats or dogs. Then the lights go out, and it's hard to breathe in the howling, racketing dark.

Eventually, the bombing slowly dies to faraway thunder until the All Clear's single steady note frees us at last. The relief is like floating up through deep water. We find our way with flashlights. If there is electricity, we take the lift to the fourth floor; if not, we have to climb the stairs, dragging our suitcases. When Nurse unlocks the door, we never know what we'll see. Several times, despite the crisscrossing of tape and thick blackout curtains, the windows facing the park have blown in, covering the carpets and furniture with jagged splinters of glass. After some particularly bad raids, I vomit down my dressing gown without warning, once over my new pink slippers, the warm, stinking mess spewing out of my mouth as I stand shocked and appalled that Nurse will have to clean it up.

If the windows are intact, my mother occasionally opens the sitting room curtains, and we sit in the dark, watching London's chimneys and steeples silhouetted against the crimson sky, the fires themselves churning, leaping, giving off clouds of sparks. It is so beautiful it seems impossible that people are screaming to death in those flames.

Each raid was similar to all the others—first, distant thuds, then the whining and crashing of bombs get closer, and the increasing roar of anti-aircraft guns. Sometimes there would be a strange lull in which we could hear the calm tenor of the commander of the gun emplacement across the road, "Load. Aim. Fire," then more ear-shattering explosions.

We sat on planks in the basement, night after night, corners leaking shadows and bare bulbs swaying on their cords as the building shook. When we first arrived in Albion Gate, the cellar was quite crowded. There were a number of children, many adults, and a black Labrador who trembled frantically as the din of the bombs increased. By the beginning of 1942, there were only a dozen or so grown-ups left, all on some sort of war duty. The dog was gone, and I was the only child.

The adults, in their cool British way, were kind to me. A retired naval commander who had sailed into ports all over the world told me anecdotes about each of them. An elderly actress produced great gusts of Milton and Shakespeare and Keats. A white-haired Oxford don told stories from Greek and Roman mythology. A doctor whistled an endless variety of birdsongs, and a woman with a soft, round voice, matching her soft, round face, sang the popular songs of the day: A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square, The White Cliffs of Dover, and I'll Be Seeing You in All the Old Familiar Places.

One night the grown-ups decided to put on a show. They unlocked their storage rooms and pulled out trunks with labels from hotels and cities all over the world. Out came hunting pinks, flappers' beaded shifts, iridescent cloaks, tailcoats, court costumes with knee britches and brocade waistcoats, and enormous Edwardian hats decorated with ostrich feathers and yards of veiling. They tugged all this finery over their dressing gowns and embarked upon a series of skits about drunken butlers insulting their dowager employers, dim-witted train conductors arguing about schedules with vapid debutantes, and fat ladies getting stuck in doorways. I was delighted and totally distracted from the surrounding tumult; only years later did I understand what extraordinary courage and kindness had gone into that performance.

Mummy, Nurse, and I had our own little corner in which we talked about New York and our family who had succeeded in traveling to America from France while we had managed only to get as far as Great Britain from Romania via Hungary, Italy, and Switzerland. We imagined America where people could sleep through the entire night; America—its vast, sunny spaces, lighted streets, shops filled with unrationed goods, and our whole family reunited. I dreamed of the twenty-eight flavors of ice cream which my grandfather had described as being sold in an astonishing place named Howard Johnson. My mother talked about French perfume and buying all the clothes she wanted without coupons. Nurse focused on enough cigarettes and oranges for breakfast and no more queues. In the long, vengeful night of the war, America shone with distant intensity like the Emerald City.

Air raids continued as the context of everyone's daily existence. Whenever we left the flat for any reason, I was always afraid I wouldn't see it again—either I wouldn't return or if I did, it wouldn't be there. I kissed the flat, furry top of Teddy's head, looked around my room, memorizing the blue-and-white-patterned curtains, the striped bedspread, the bookcase with its familiar books and photographs, and my small upright piano. Beside the bed stood my brown leather air-raid suitcase. Be safe, Teddy. Be safe, room, I would think. Make sure I come back to you.

No one went a single block without automatically noting where the nearest shelter was. Large walls of sandbags barricaded the entrances to banks and government offices, which were frequently also fenced with coils of barbed wire. Statues were either sandbagged or removed. From the bus, Nurse and I watched children playing in the ruins of houses and taking home bomb detonators and unexploded shells as souvenirs. Their older sisters had appropriated any fallen parachutes as material for wedding dresses. Safety ropes placed around craters were hung with messages like prayer flags, informing the public where blasted-out businesses had moved to. Casualty lists were posted on nearby walls. Even swifter than the posting of information was the arrival of the Women's Voluntary Service, who handed out mugs of steaming tea within minutes of any disaster. Scores of shops were burned out, although many did manage to stay open in the shells of buildings, using windows for entrances and tarpaulins for ceilings. Pasted up outside were handwritten signs typical of Londoners' chirpy confidence: We are more open than ever! or Gerry can't stop us—Business as usual! or Shuttered but not shattered!

Women, including nuns in full habits, swept broken glass off the streets or stood on exposed rooftops all night, identifying enemy planes and spotting fires. Postmen climbed mountains of bricks to deliver letters though broken windows or to empty the pillar boxes, traditionally red but now painted yellow to be more visible in the blackout. Not given to self-pity or hysteria, the British were especially buoyed by the king and queen walking through smoking fields of rubble, shaking hands with their grimy subjects and complimenting them on their bravery. Above them all, Big Ben stood amid smoke and sirens, continuing to chime the hours even after taking a bomb down its tower.

Part I

So Many Places to Begin

Chapter 1

Romania isn't a country: it's a profession.

Nicolas II, Tsar of Russia

Balkan Overture

When people ask where I'm from, I answer, I was born in Romania, and wait for one of the responses I've come to expect: I just loved Budapest, or Are you a gypsy? and I have to explain that Romania is a medium-sized, populous country at the southeastern edge of Europe, separated from Asia by the Black Sea. Its capital is Bucharest, and its immediate neighbors are Hungary, Moldova, Bulgaria, Ukraine, and Russia.

Because of its geographic position, the country is planted in both East and West, in both a superstitious past and an acquisitive present. And because of its history, its language is closer to the Latin spoken by the Romans than that of any other European country.

In the Romania of my childhood, gypsies were regarded as tricksters and thieves. To be called a tsigane was an insult. Bucharest was full of gypsies. The women in swirling multicolored skirts and black shawls caught at people's sleeves, promising accurate fortunes if their palms were crossed with silver. On an island in Bucharest's Lake Cismigui with its battalions of swans, male gypsies played their violins all night on the terrace of a white restaurant under the stars—or so my father told me.

Romanian gypsies, 1930

Flower-sellers in Bucharest

My mother hunting with gypsies in the Delta of the Danube

A city of leafy parks and wide boulevards, Bucharest was lined with houses in the style of the French Second Empire, their gardens tucked behind high iron fences.

During the Ides of March, men and women gave each other little charms called mercesouri to wear on bracelets threaded with thin red ribbons as protection against the Evil Eye. At Easter, everyone, Orthodox or not, held up scarlet-dyed eggs to crack against each other's eggs. All year long, in the huge square in front of the palace, beggars squatted in rags, their dirty hands held up in silence.

Outside Bucharest, the tip and spill of dusty roads ran through gulfs of pines and chestnuts, past villages with rounded thatch roofs and eddies of sheep. Men, in long white shirts and felt boots and lozenge-shaped hats, stood without expression to watch us pass. Their women waved at us, flashing black eyes and very white teeth in their dark faces, the red-and-blue smocking on their blouses matching their long, full skirts and headscarves. Like their children, they went barefoot most of the year.

Cars were so rare on those unpaved roads that children and dogs had not yet learned their dangers.

Baksheesh

Like many Balkan countries, Romania had spent more time as an occupied territory than as an independent nation. Its history is a record of defeats and repression as the country's plentiful natural resources were claimed by wave after wave of marauders.

Baksheesh—the giving of bribes for anything from everyday needs to cover up a crime—was a major legacy of the Turks who had occupied Romania for centuries. According to my father, who saw no problem with the endemic corruption of