But first, everything anew. For them, the millennium came early. 

Early evening on the fifteenth of September 1998, America unfurled beneath steady seas of clouds beneath Paul and Ana’s eyes. Holding hands, they peered past the window crystals.  Trembling bodies, intent on a first look at their new country.

What if I don’t want to live in  any country? A four-year-old Maya had asked nine Septembers ago, when told that she would soon be leaving for another country, with her parents. No, that wasn’t an option.

Is nowhere not a country? 

Well, maybe just the seas and clouds, but then you’d have to turn into a birdfish, babygirl. 

Is it a story?

Those first few months, America was pure fiction. A “lifetime special” of new things. Funny things. Good things. Strange things. Times Square and department stores. 

Think of how striking it must all be, for them, Teresa had to remind Maya, whenever they marveled too deeply at ordinary things, whenever the newness of things revealed itself in unexpected ways (a teenager bringing pizza to your door, kids with purple hair, women with earrings in their tongues, men with tattoos on their faces, cold coffee from plastic cups, endless bounty of heaping fruit, gleaming dewy beautiful for their pleasure at every hour of every day). 

For all their years (a hundred and forty lived between them), Paul and Ana couldn’t be jaded. Not during those first trips into the City, not by the novelty of the Manhattan skyline, grey Goliath unfurling from the bend of the L.I.E. then, or by the city’s angles, tones, surfaces cascading in, piercing the light at the tunnel’s end. The tall streets, busy with every kind of person, singing the magic of togetherness in time, of now, of moving shouting being with wind and dirt and steam, under the narrow skies. Everything brilliant tesserae, bewitching mosaic in timeless flux. 

The capacity to be astonished. Breathlessness, in a good way. 

With relishing their children’s long-absent physicality came a profound sense of visceral rootedness. Thrilling reminder of how it is to know things that have become unknown.

Teresa’s face: aged, circumspect, truly adult for the first time, in a way he couldn’t have imagined. Those final remnants of her youth vanished by her bold audition for the American Dream, by diligently exercising the hard-won privilege of doctoring America’s folk back to sanity. A living face their lips hadn’t touched for eight years, last seen through a disappearing Skoda 100R Series window, on Saturday the twelfth of May, 1990.  

Her voice, disembodied for 3,048 varied days, attached now to its body’s gestures, eyes, limbs again. Thoughts, until recently penned in ink, now a hand resting on his shoulder.  

And Maya. Bodies borne of him, everything he’d ever made. Breaking the world open at his feet. 

Paul experienced the move to America as something of a swan song. It wasn’t Ana’s victory march, but a postscript punctuating an already spent conclusion. The end of a long narrative burdened by too many plot twists. 

First, they’d survived. Them—subjects of foreign kings and whims, of native-tongued monsters and other-tongued prophets (hear the German boots the Soviet tanks the Yankee bombs, the slogans and drums). They—old bodies. But relatively unscathed.

That last opus, a year so monumental it sent history in search of new meanings. Stand alone. Sign, signifier, and signified. 1989.

With revolution, worlds collapsed, inverting. Walls tumbled, airspaces yawned, enemies became mates and friends nemeses. 

And what do you do, when places forbidden transfigured into playing-fields, when demons and angels swap robes? When slogans reinterpret themselves and new meanings become possible?  

Everybody asked, nobody knew, but all that mattered was that the shouting never stopped, that hope was only getting started, new lives just beginning. 

Overnight, scarcity became plenty—products, products, all around! Politicians handed out blue jeans on the streets. The King of Pop came and went moonwalking off western winds, and young and old together succumbed to collective hysteria. A personality cult of a different kind—that cocktail of hope and freedom and love for the tormented body of an American god, too potent to bear. And Brazilian voices graced you, singsong, because everyone fell in love with a woman called “Isaura” when telenovelas replaced the Party on television, when television came with color, when fuck production quotas but long live the consumption!

And Ana? At last, she prayed to her Virgin and her baby in peace. Prayed for her family, for the souls of heroes felled for freedom to ascend to heaven on schedule. Blessed little Maya for the extraordinary foresight of being born on the cusp of freedom, no less. Fed her, while her parents bartered dollars for trips across newly opened borders, all the way to Istanbul. Where, two among thousands of budding entrepreneurs, they filled their car with the bazaar, and idled in a traffic jam of biblical proportions, idled for their impending profit. 

And Paul? Even during those forty long days, Paul was as productive as ever. So much to do, decommunize the rule of law, institutionalize democracy, streamline facilitate evidence accord transition transfer fix and administer—administer the bureaucracy of daily life. Lest we forget that all survival demands are the passionless things. (So busy he was, in fact, that he hardly had the time to think about ghosts past. To ask the questions he’d longed to exorcise. To wonder, where’s Bluma? Could I find her, now? What say you, this irony? Freedom, just in time for my sixtieth year!). 

And just as soon, the side-effects arrived. Because the cure for such a chronic illness—first shocking, the unsurprising, the ever-shifting commentators, new arbiters of free thought, opined—proved to be almost as dangerous in its side-effects, as it sequelae. The realities of unplanning, of liberalizing stabilizing privatizing, dispersed the revelers with concussive force. 

Great deceptions uncovered, how freedom forecasts doom, for some. The unbridled wizard of rogue capitalism, unbound from his cage, performed his party tricks: pensions dissipated, livelihoods threatened. Those who missed their daily bread, their promised recompense of lifetimes of quietude and acquiescence, wailed and mourned the deaths of their dictators on new television channels. Irony became something like products now lined the shelves, asking to be owned—but shiny bills in your pocket had sprouted so many zeroes over night, that you couldn’t make them worth anything.  

And what’s going to happen, and what should we do? Teresa and Nick, asked. Paul’s longstanding experience, coupled with his consummate optimism, predicted that eventually, the markets would tame themselves, come to shine in more socially democratic, charitable ways. Accept that inevitable compromise, the communitarian contract, inevitable station of all civilized humanity. That eventually, real democracy—ever incentivized by that strict European mother, waiting to welcome its lost children with open arms, should they behave, prove their repute— would deign to smile. 

But who ever knew, how long eventually might take? And so he just couldn’t say when, or how, or stay.

And with that, Teresa and Nick, like so many others, made the leap. Dove into the cracks that had opened, burrowed and wiggled and clawed their way to better. 

Teresa’s campaign to get her parents to America began almost as soon as she’d arrived, and proved as relentless as all her others. Sure, they wouldn’t be able to move for who knew how long, what with the gods of immigration blowing hot and cold, trumpeting their whims at leisure. But surely it would never be too early to start the convincing, figured Teresa.  

Inevitable though he knew the move would be—because how could he deny Ana her right to grow old with her children, her own small foreign corner of family, standing firm until the end—Paul feared that it would stifle his vigor. Soak-up his intellect and paint him lackadaisical and enervated. Entrap him, in a waiting room for absolutely nothing. 

Be patient, was the parting incantation he sometimes heard Ana whisper into the receiver, those years of stubborn resistance, while waiting his turn to speak to Teresa. A small window into that parallel universe of women teaching women how to convince their husbands, or fathers of things. The painstaking, stealthy art of claiming something, cajoling your due, from your husband. Passed down through generations, tricks for clearing paths of resistance—here’s how you weave coincidences, how you plant ideas, how you jostle from the margins, how you give and withhold, how you take patient detours. It pained him, to find Ana, and the girls, dealing in this real-politick of the powerless, deploying this absurd Aesopian-think. For surely, he’d never been that kind of man. 

That’s how we’ll get him used to the idea—give him time to close this chapter, she said, another time.  Which made him remember the chapter of her fourth and last pregnancy, which she spent in bed reading novel after novel (month after month four times over). And how difficult those decadently bourgeois books had been to procure, there being no hint of social realism between their lines. But procure them he did, because—in her only act of counter-revolutionary resistance—no way was Ana going to read books about the sacrificial love of star-crossed tractor operators. And while he’ll never know what books his wife did read during the long months, he’ll always be grateful for those words that safely shepherded his second born alive child into life.

This younger child, his namesake Paula, had always been a free spirit. Unconventional one who took flight like a tropical bird of paradise on the winds of revolution, to administer medical care to Caribbean islanders. 

Imagine Paul’s surprise to discover that even Paula had, if reluctantly, joined the America cheerleading team. Of this he learned one summer afternoon during Paula’s home leave, when, arriving home at an unusual time, he caught her plotting loudly with Teresa on the phone. 

Of course I’d be relieved if they went, Paula was saying, but you know he has a life here, contributes . . . No, you just act like he’s crazy for not groveling to chew the fact in your. . . Why should it be appealing? Yes, you need to frame it another way . . . God, I don’t know—is it me they’re paying to be a shrink? He’ll have to have some activities, at—

Tiptoeing back outside, Paul was in unequal measures disturbed and tickled by this inevitable reversal. His children dissecting his future, his doings, his choices. At least I’ve made it this far, is what he told himself. 

Paul’s resistance began to give way when the rallying cries turned to the familial (don’t you want more time with Maya, before college, and Paula will visit, and mom will be so happy!). To his health, to guilting him into living, as though that wasn’t what he’d been doing just fine, for so long. Take care, slow down, don’t consume yourself so, they said, like he’d been chewing himself from the inside out, the workforce will reorganize itself, the laws will draft themselves, this godforsaken country’s problems aren’t worth your health, and treatments in America are more advanced…in case, I mean…just. 

The temptations of America soon came filtered through yet another lens— Didn’t you know, that Queens is the paradise of our people, just like back home, really, your language rings through streets where you run into friends, we have stores. Truly, it sounded appealing, and it wasn’t even that far from Stony Brook, this microcosm of home called Sunnyside.

When at last they went, penning their own postscript, it was a peroration that Paul dared not complain about. Because how many hadn’t died, for that chance to live the end of their days in Uncle Sam’s benevolent playground, that realm that had won history?

Sometimes, it was better than he had hoped for. Presiding over that first Christmas, the feeling that all the life he needed had gathered itself around him, Ana, Maya, Teresa and Nick, Paula and Emil. The plentiful table, nothing to want, escape, negotiate—just life. 

Only the tree, felled and sagging under too much warmth and kitsch, had looked unhappy then. 

❈

Once they had settled in, life once again surprised Paul. This time, with its extraordinary capacity to adjust itself, to morph into routines, as consistently reliable and startling as daylight lancing darkness after a long night. For the first time, he felt that he would be perfectly content, should things continue in the same ways forever. There was nothing more to strive for, the striving having morphed into encouragement of their children’s striving—the prospects of which, given their winning personal characteristics of Caucasian, advanced degrees in the sciences, reasonable good looks, want discipline diligence and commitment, he found no reason to worry himself over. There was nothing more to fear, at least nothing that was not inevitable. Like time, about which nothing was evitable, but which long ago learned to accept as incontrovertible. 

On Long Island, nearing the turn of the century, the routine of their new lives had set in as solidly, as incontestably, as the new millennium. Which they’d rung in, in a fit of merriness, dancing to the lost notes of Boney M. and ABBA, at Nora Constantine’s house in New Jersey—which was much like how they spent many other weekends, when the five of them would pack into the car and head to New Jersey, or better yet, drive the car onto a boat, and cross the Sound into Connecticut.

The Stony Brook home—two-floored, four-bedroomed, gardened—was like a lush, sprawling story, big enough, good enough, to cradle them all in its benefic grip. And yet, became as gently familiar as their cramped apartment back home. Each day, the same intimations of life left them satiated, filled. For the first time in her life, on weekdays, Ana would sleep longer than her husband, than her daughter. Leaving her in the never ceasing comfort of the soft sheets (the duck-filled comforters of which she could only have dreamed a few years ago) Paul would put on the coffee—not on the stovetop in a small Turkish kettle, as Ana had done all of her life before, but simply with a click of a button on the automated machine—and wait for Nick and Teresa to make their ways downstairs. He replaced Ana in playing that part now, of father encouraging daughter to eat something before her day at the hospital. Every day, he would shuffle his way, lazily across the driveway, to pick-up The New York Times from the edge of the lawn and deposit the mail, usually bills that Teresa had signed the night before—because here, you didn’t have to queue at the Post Office, to pay your dues in a duly social manifestation.  

Every day, they exchanged morning thoughts and words, for half an hour, like he imagined families around the world always should have. Every day, he beamed with pride in the fact that his daughter, that very one that they’d created, had created herself anew. That she could leave her spacious house, drive her spacious car, and practice medicine in America, filling her days with the worthy tasks of caring for others, of helping life continue, carry on, satisfy its desire for living. Sometimes, and despite lacking a local license, he even drove the mammoth car, automatic, laughably easy to navigate, on the smooth American roads. 

Then, the full days with Ana. Somehow the same and variable, at once. The satellite television channel the children had gotten them, despite their automatic protestations, which added a pleasant dimension to their days—a string of continuity somehow. Neither of them enjoyed the vapid new shows that tried to mimic the melodramas of the Uruguayan or Colombian telenovelas, or the mindless droll-but-not-actually-funny inconsequential chatter, meaninglessness, of American TV shows. The forms just didn’t translate, somehow. When they were lucky, there would be retrospectives of vintage performances from their days. Lyrical ballads sung by glamorous, then young now old women, comedy skits that were truly funny, rapid-fire wit-laden performances that were all the more interesting, for the things they couldn’t say—their hints, their insinuations, their hidden messages. The large screen mercifully black, white, and silver, a comfort they didn’t realize they’d needed. 

Watching these retrospectives with Ana, Paul noticed for the first time how they both laughed at the same time. How much they’d experienced, understood together, without even the need to speak things. He understood now the placidity and tameness of American political comedy, like that the girls loved to watch late on Saturday night (that it was live from New York, seemed to be main selling point), probably had something to do with the lack of creativity inspired by the ability to speak things plainly, to mock in plain sight, to jostle outwardly. There was no fear, no terror, no threat, lying behind the surface of this comedy, which made it less effective. The one he liked consistently was the Daily Show. He also didn’t find groundbreaking, what with its usually in-your-face conclusions, things too plainly stated and mocked, the absurdities in much too plain sight. Or maybe it was just the fact that he didn’t know so many of the guest actors, musicians, like most other viewers must have, that lessened his enjoyment. But Maya did, and loved it, and so they always watched it together, the only ones to do so, and he liked the host, his enthusiasm, his seemingly genuine caring, warmed something in Paul.

And of course, his daily, parceled-out consumption of the New York Times, to which he would return several times a day. Sometimes, even the following days, armed with a notebook and his old fountain pen, to make strides in his English, to note new vocabulary words, phrases. So much did Paul love that beacon of American democracy, that Maya had most delightfully unexpected of surprises bought him the newly-minted fifth edition of the The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage for Christmas later that year. Where he found all manner of curious, or hilarious, exhortations.  

And there was plenty of time to read other books, too. In fact, in those early years, Paul felt his curiosity returning. Curiosity about the world, about history, about the organization of life—something he hadn’t felt since the early days. Like a self-forgotten anthropologist, sociologist awoken from a century-long dream, a color enthusiast finally able to tear off his sepia glasses lenses after a decades-long slumber. 

But awoken from what, exactly? From a lack of spare time, but also of possibility, and of uncensored words, in some good measure. It was good, too, to find himself interested in the same subjects he’d always been interested in. Never mind that most of it led to the inevitable conclusion, which he didn’t need to be reminded about, that this world leaves so much wanting. That all systems have their problems, and that life, as designed, rarely tends towards fairness. 

And so it was that those two years could have stretched on forever, or at least indefinitely, as far as Paul was concerned. 

❈

But it was all the new, unburdened time spent with Ana that most satiated Paul. Coming to know her in a different light, so many full decades later, after Teresa and Paula and Maya, was remarkable. 

Of course, they hadn’t said to each other, on the day of their wedding, only four short months after they met—Let’s do this, yes, forget our own selves where necessary, because every young Party functionary needs an adored wife at his side, to demonstrate his seriousness, his commitment to nation-building, and because every lovely young woman needs her knight, his armor and his promise. What better shield against this brutishly changeable world, making family, building lives other than our own? This, our only shelter against death and against country. 

And that’s just how it was, all those solid years of country-building and home-making, of child-scrambling and security-chasing, leaving little time, or inclination, for mutual soul searching, dilly-dallying, probing the beloved’s useless dreams.  

Paul wouldn’t change a thing. And yet, watching Ana prepare his favorite dishes for the first time, he’s amazed that he’d never known a moment like this before. Had she always ever so gently poked the dough that rose like a belly full of new life? So lovingly cradled the potatoes, washing them like precious stones? Sung those soft notes just beautifully so, paused to gaze beyond the trees with dreaming in her eyes? It made him shudder, to realize the ways in which his other’s look and hand and breath and skin, that she who touched and held and fueled him for so long, could yet conceal so much. 

These are the kinds of things Paul comes to know of Ana: 

The night before the miscarriage—the first, she says unprompted. She puts the knife, the eggplant down, straightens her back and gazes across the kitchen table. Fixes her pale gaze, splendidly still blue eyes, on the woody parcel of land behind their deck, as if addressing the squirrels who meander on the edge of the flowerbed. 

It was February, do you remember? 

How could I forget? He asks about that winter of 1955. It isn’t easy to forget a second year of crushed hopes, the death of Stalin having sent no calmer winds their way as yet. A year that landed screaming its dubious facts—how a decade passed since the war’s end, and things are worse; how he’s just turned twenty-six, and how there’s still no child, two years later—

Praporgescu. She names the street, their first home, tapping its memory like a hollow tree, and he sees the house, all twisting wooden bones and beautifully carved motifs. The timber gate, veiled in violet-purple, lavender-blue lilacs each May. 

The wagon-style house was large, three rooms off a hallway, a kitchen cramped at its end.  They lived in one room, Mrs. Nagy in another, and Fraulein Ute, Ana’s Salesian friend, in the last.  Mrs. Nagy’s husband, class enemy, had once owned the entire house, before the people’s representatives stepped in to remedy his exploits. Both his landholdings and his subjugated peasants, still foolishly weeping for him or for themselves, were then collectivized. And while Mr. Nagy marched himself to a prison camp (for such is our complicity against ourselves), Paul and Ana, devoted young harbingers of the luminous future, timidly obeyed their generous directive to quarter themselves in one of the Praporgescu rooms. 

It was a happy house for a while, before it was a sad house. Place where they dreamt and named their first child, who was labored, but never lived. 

Unthinkable, Paul thinks, that if Cantemir had lived he would have been forty-seven. Or that Teresa, Paula, Maya wouldn’t have lived at all, because isn’t that how it works, life wagered against life without logic? 

I wanted to die, then. The night before we lost him, Ana said. I couldn’t tell you. You might’ve locked me up, the old woman laughs. I woke up with a start, because Mrs. Nagy was swallowing her bitter life with wail-shouts like she did sometimes. And I knew that something terrible would happen. I felt that death was coming from the inside. Cantemir told me in a dream, that he didn’t want to come. He asked if it was a good world, if the world was good, and what could I tell him? 

Why didn’t you tell me? 

You had to leave. Remember it was that meeting that couldn’t be missed. How Leon wouldn’t let you, bitterly, she sees his face fall in sadness. No. Don’t worry. I would’ve been too scared, too young and stupid to tell you anyway. 

District sub-Secretary, Paul couldn’t miss the monthly meetings in the capital. The grueling 8-hour journey aside, it was a coveted position. Entrusted with sufficiently apolitical portfolios, bureaucratic enough, removed enough from the center to stay clean—but still, reserving a seat at a table. Which, if the reformers, Leon’s grand campaigns, prevailed, would become an entirely other proposition. The position, the result of a hard-won compromise with Leon, who had convinced him not to quit the Party, not to commit that special brand of suicide, not with a young wife with child. Patience, was Leon’s motto, wait out these hardline years. Turn away when you feel aghast, because that dream we fought for, it’s just around some corner.

But you were dancing—he says, wondering if he misremembers, but he’s sure, it was that same night when, rushing home like a madman, he stepped into the warmly-lit bosom of that old house to find Ana with Fraulein Ute in the kitchen, flour smeared in their hair, at arm’s length because Cantemir, invisible, lay between them. Looping, they laughed like children, and even Mrs. Nagy sat watching from the table, untensed until her smile became a glare with the sight of him.  

And then the dancing stopped—You must be hungry, Ana exclaimed, and—Yes, my dear, he said, although he rather would’ve danced, and Fraulein Ute, embarrassed and warmed pink up to the roots of her impossibly blonde hair, giggled her good night. Leaving them there, disoriented, some energy unspent and trapped. 

It was only hours later, from the depths of a dream he would never know, that he heard Ana’s blood curling scream. Running into the bathroom he slipped on the blood of wife and child, then dragged it across the carpet, the steps, and snow, screaming doctor! telephone! into the night, while Mrs. Nagy and Fraulein Ute hovered over Ana, screaming terrified.   

Did I ever tell you, Mrs. Nagy told me once that you’d think it was my fault? She was drunk, said you’d think I was an evil, a loose woman, for killing two of your children. That men like you would divorce stupid women like me, for not contributing to the national cause, she laughed now. Maybe then I would finally understand the poison that is the Party. And stupid girl that I was, oh God, I believed her!

Old bitch, Paul said, although of course she would’ve still been relatively young, compared to them now. Baba Yaga, he sighed, that’s what they used to call her, because they were still children. From so far away, it felt impossible that they had ever been that young, and lived those other lives. 

I was so frightened of her, sometimes, when you were gone, that I would knock on Frauelin Ute’s door. And she would let me spend the night with her, Ana said like it was something to confess. I never told you, because I thought you wouldn’t like it. She rubs the skin of a small, spotty potato, examining its surface as though it might offer a looking-glass onto those women sharing a bed. 

Fraulein Ute, she said, her eyes soft. I wonder where she is.

If she is, Paul thought. Two and a half years after they left Praporgescu, Ana stopped receiving regular letters from Fraulein Ute. Her last had described the growing difficulty of things, vivid memories of her once Bavarian summers. It was a coded plea, Ana, at last a new mom, had decided, and begged Paul to help her emigrate. And he had tried. 

Are you sure that they let her go? she asks now and slices her finger instead of the potato. Paul jumps at the sight of her blood falling, the same blood that he and the Fraulein had wiped off a different floor, crying themselves into the morning.

As sure as we can be of anything, he says. 

Ana watched him lingeringly sometimes, after such revelations. As though waiting for him, too, to confess to something. As though waiting for him to say, yes, I also never told you, how afraid I was, of those, my own nights in bed, with a foreign woman.

“Places of Memory” is an excerpt from the novel-in-progress Midnight in Exile.