My grandmother used to make sun-brewed tea. She set out the gallon jar on the sidewalk in front of her house, our house eventually, on the hand-poured cement, between imprints of my mother’s seven year old hands and my uncle’s two-year old feet. It was the first house she had ever lived in, married at 31 years of age to my grandfather, who fought in the Pacific during World War II. It was 1953.
Alex’s grandmother Maria is 18. She lives, with her parents, in an apartment above the restaurant they own, along the Crisul River. The architects of war have changed their nationalities back and forth. Of late, they are Hungarian. Her father, perhaps drunk, perhaps foolish, makes a clever joke of this. The next day, she is tossed onto the sidewalk in front of her house. It is 1940.
Diaspora is such a pretty word, far too lovely for what it means. Maria is like the scattering of seeds, blown eastward. Her family, like tumbleweeds, firmly rooted in generation fields, struggle with their eviction. Maria smiles in their photos. Along a great and terrible journey from home.
My grandmother lost her husband in 1976, the Bicentennial. I have one memory, being so little. My first memory. He would make little fires in the yard, and scatter the coals with an old shovel blade, the handle long rotted away. He would use an iron bar to manipulate the blade, then leave it among the coals. I grasp the shovel blade. The scar, burnt into my hand, remained visible on my right palm until a few years ago. A portent, of sorts.
Alex’s mother shares the unwanted distinction of carrying on the widow line. Like her own mother, her mother-in-law, her sister-in-law, she has lost a husband at a young age. She lives with us, surrounded by imagery which would imply that life merely begins at 50. She is alone, 5,000 miles from her hometown.
I meet Maria in 1994, during the Christmas holiday. She cackles with glee when I speak a few words of Romanian. She pulls me aside and warns me that Alex’s father drinks too much, making a sort of bull’s horn gesture with her hand and tipping the thumb towards her lips. I tell her I understand and she cackles again. She cannot pronounce my name. She calls me ‘Bregner.’ The sisters laugh at her, and in the laughing and the drinking, I cannot imagine she was once an 18 year old on foot forced from her home by a Great and Idiotic War.
She died two years ago. In October of 2003, we were planning on taking both kids to visit their Great- and Grand-mothers. We had the tickets in our hands. The phone call warned us to hurry. Maria had a stroke. She soon died.
In January of 1995, Maria invited me into the tiny kitchen for a coffee. I had been dating Alex for only a few weeks. Days, really, though how can you measure the time that passes when you first realize your journey may soon be underway? I finished the coffee and Maria took the cup, poured the grounds onto a napkin, and read our futures at the end of a toothpick. She said that Alex was always meant for a long journey that would take her far away from her family. She said that voyage would be starting soon. Alex’s father walked into the kitchen and rolled his eyes. When he left, Maria signaled to me with her thumb and forefinger that he drank too much.
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