Choices
Part of a form to be filled when you applied for a visa.
For me the filling out of forms is a relatively weird job. I have an unreliable memory, while bureaucracies all over the world have an almost perfect one. And while filling out forms you have to be consistent, telling the same story about yourself. When applying for a visa you had to remember things which for me where not essential, like how many times and when did you visit so and so country? Things that should be, presumably, true. “I declare that the information given in this form is complete and correct and the visit to Wherevia will be undertaken for the purpose indicated in the application.” Actually, I’m not really sure why I’m going to Wherevia, but who cares? Things we usually have taken for granted and now we have to think about: nationality, in some conflict torn places, grandparents, citizenship which is the choice of fate, destiny, a god or other or simply luck or lack of it rather, place of birth on a smaller scale is again a matter of timing. True, nowadays you can choose so much as a parent for your future child including place of birth, gender, whether you kill one of the twins or just stop playing God and accept both. Not in those days however. In those days you couldn’t even know if it was going to be a she or a he, healthy or less so, if there were twins or even more. Oh yes, the wise old women would drop salt on your head without you knowing it, and watch you. Boy — if you reached for your nose, girl — if you reached for your mouth or chin. This can never go wrong they would tell you. And you believed them. Or not. And somehow life was simpler. The choices were mostly made for you and you only had to follow. Decision-making is so energy draining!
We are usually not required to choose our mother tongue. On forms. The rubric is rarely there, if at all. We can’t do it in real life either. It’s a given. Thanks whoever we believe is there for us to thank for that. Lately, however, I started to think about it. I always thought my mother tongue was Romanian. Probably because in the later part of my life I was speaking Romanian with everyone around me, including my mum. But then, long after she was gone, I started to remember, to have glimpses of how I used to speak a language with her and another one with my dad.
And how I was always told by mum and dad, but mostly by mum: learn all the languages you can. The more you know and speak, the more people you are and, therefore, the stronger. Even Romani, which at the time was clearly called Gypsy by everybody we knew, was considered by mum and dad to be a useful language. And I did know a few words. Mostly ones to make you feel daring, brave in stepping over conventions to be generally “cool”.
Living where I lived, in Bucharest, Romania, in the early fifties of the last century my world was happy and serene, surrounded by love and laughter, by stories and games that I was playing mostly by myself and later on with my brother and the relatively few children in the neighbourhood. Sunshine and laughter — this is what I remember. It was after the war. I never had any glimpse of the darker and frightful world around me, the one I learnt so much about later on, many lives later. The world I slowly came to realize was assaulting and confining my own mum and dad’s lives, our own lives, homes, friends and relatives. Those were the days when the only connection of our lives to this other, larger world was the radio. No TV, movies were a treat, a luxury after the war, but I didn’t even know then that the world was after a war. Most like many of today’s kids who do not know that the world has only a few minutes, possibly even seconds, till its midnight.
I was speaking a language with my mum, another one with my dad and that was normal. When I was six or seven I saw the first TV set ever in the flat of our next-door neighbours whom I adored. They had a teenage daughter who occasionally played with me, teaching me how to read and write, showing off her French acquired from private tutoring and her Russian from school. When they emigrated to Israel she left her Russian dictionary with me. School was that mysterious place where I’d be going in a year’s time and I was so much looking forward to.
The TV set only added another layer to the already many reasons for adoring my neighbours. The awe, the excitement, the miracle, the worries of not being allowed to watch enough. And the occasion to discover so many other sounds of other languages. Not many other languages. Mostly Russian and German. And it was then that my small world started to grow and vicariously, but intensely and grippingly, witnessed the war, the nazis and the partisans, and so much fighting and killing and slaughtering. The images are blurred however and it’s mainly the sounds that I still remember. Not the words, or the meanings, just the sounds. Both the sounds coming from the luminiscent box and those coming from the many people around it, gathered to watch the miracle, discuss whatever was exciting in those days, surreptitiously looking at our neighbour’s flat, at what they were eating, or not, generally only for hoarding up gossip stuff for later. Looking back now from the age, experiences and knowledge that I have, I do realize there were many exciting and, possibly, frightening, even life-threatening things happening. On screen and off. Mainly off. The war and its consequences. Behind the curtain. This understanding however came much later, in stages, as I was growing up, and growing my own mind which, I slowly and often painfully understood, should not be revealed so easily to people outside my family, and much later even to them, to mum and dad. For other reasons, but still.
I remember the Jewish names, which I didn’t know were Jewish, and their owners’ accents which I somehow could understand as different from the fun the non-Jews were making of the way the Jews were speaking Romanian. How did they know all those differences, and how do I still remember all those things now, more than half a century later?
We all lived on the third floor of a former office building converted into small flats. I knew that on the second floor people lived in larger rooms, with a central, large but dark, hallway where they could gather and chat and their kids could play without being constantly told “don’t run so much, the people below will complain”. Below the second floor there were dentist practices and nobody complained there about the noise above as the patients were concentrating on their own pain. There were no painkillers after the war for such minor things as filling large cavities, root canal care or even, sometimes, extractions. And the constant, high-pitched, wavy, terrifying sound of the drill somehow took care of any posible complaints.
How do I know all this? Probably because some of my earliest memories are from those dentist practices. It was the time when ads constantly urged people to “give your children sweets” and, whether because of the sweets, or because of a poor diet or maybe because of genes, from that young age I used to be a patient of the dentists on the first floor. They would marvel at how such a little girl could be so good. Of course they didn’t know that mom would coach me in detail to be brave, telling me little girls don’t cry when something hurts, especially if the pain will help them be stronger, healthier. “My treasure, you are not like other children. You are brave and I want to be proud of you, my love. Don’t cry. Mother is holding your hand.”
We, on the third floor, had other benefits however. We had our private small studios. You closed the door and you were in your own tiny world. There were five such studios. Three one room studios with a tiny entrance hall and an even tinier kitchenette and two almost flats, with two “rooms” each and the entrance hall and the kitchenette merged into one space. Bathrooms? There was only one shower in one of the studios which was in the kitchenette and yes, the toilet was in there as well. The rest of us studio owners, actually renters, had each a separate tiny toilet cubicle which everybody kept locked. The people in the two-rooms flats shared a single cubicle. Could people live in those conditions? Of course. We were considered lucky to live in the very heart of downtown Bucharest, with running water, which actually didn’t run all the time, but still, and central heating which was wonderful in winter and a lot of heat in summer as we were right under the roof and no cooling devices available. Except my mum’s wet sheets which she constantly placed in the open window and often changed to keep us bearably comfortable. But we didn’t stay long in summer in Bucharest. We, my mum, my brother and myself, would go to my mum’s village in the middle of Transylvania and stay there until usually mid September. And this is where we would all three of us speak another language: my mum’s language. My dad would stay on in Bucharest and work. He would only join us for a week or so when he was on his holiday leave.
In those days people would usually not call Transylvania as such. That was a name used in official situations, in school or administration and, much later, in tourism promotion of the place of Dracula’s birth. Depending on the language you spoke the place was either Ardeal or Erdély. It was a long and adventurous journey by train. There was no direct service to where we were going so we had to change trains. They were slow in those days and you could look out and see how the houses changed after you crossed the mountains, and when shorter distance travellers came in and out our carriage we could hear them speaking German or Hungarian or both besides the all prevailing Romanian.
Our summers had been enchanting except for when I alone had to also start to learn reading and writing in my mum’s language. Why? Because I was older and wiser! This was how mum managed to keep us, my brother and myself, apart from one another: I had always to give in and let him have whatever I was playing with. I would struggle with an alphabet that looked like the Romanian one, but some letters were read and pronounced differently. I remember that I discovered suddenly that some people in the village spoke the language of my mum while others spoke Romanian. The grown ups seemed to know who spoke what language and would be speaking accordingly. My granddad, when we would walk together to the village shop to buy whatever we had to buy, always knew in what language to greet the people we were meeting. That was something relatively strange for a city kid like myself: at home, in the city, I had to greet only the people I knew. I would never greet strangers. Actually I was constantly taught by my parents never to talk with strangers. And yet here, in the village, this was strongly expected from well-behaved city children like me and my brother.
“But, tátika, how do I know in what language to greet people?”
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“It doesn’t matter my dear”, my granddad would answer. “Whatever language you use they will answer in the same language! But if you don’t say anything, that is really very rude.”
“But why do people speak different languages here and in Bucharest, we all speak the same language.”
My grand dad would look silently at me and then would burst into laughter: “Because over here, we are smarter and know more than you do in your big city! That’s why!”
***
It must have been September 1964. Why do I know so precisely? Because the things I’m going to talk about somehow changed my whole life. Or rather gave me a life, so different from the one I might have had if that September hadn’t happened or had been different.
Do I remember exactly the day or the moment? No. Actually I started thinking of that September much later, after 1989 and my more frequent travells abroad. And I keep going back to it especially now, when I’m so far away in time, and I no longer have people to ask how it happened exactly. I was a 12 year old kid returning to school after a long summer holiday that I would spend as usual in my mum’s village. I loved the place and I also loved to live in the open, walking around bare feet in the grass, running about the hills and the valleys, chasing cattle, poultry and other kids. Since I was coming from the city I somehow had a sort of unspoken permission to do things that were denied to the others. I loved to do all the things that village kids did, playing in the mud, getting dirty, eating from the ground or from the trees, no fear of germs or other sophisticated dangers that kids face today. And yet, in spite of all the fun I used to have in the country, I longed to come back to the city. Towards the beginning of September, school always started on the 15 September, I was so deeply longing to come back to the city, to our little two-room flat to where my parents recently moved with our by now large black-and-white TV, to go back to school, to touch and feel the new textbooks and smell their fresh ink, to open them and browse quickly to see the wonders that I was going to discover. No internet, no smart apps, land line phones were very rare, we didn’t have one, not even as much television or movies as today to make books fade away and capture our whole interest into the watching of things and into the now. No, I grew up with a love for reading and I can still feel and tell the difference from my students and own kids — they too love to read, but they do not necessarily feel the hunger for books we had. They are happy with the text flickering on the screen of any device and can read in any position and any conditions. I can do that myself, but if it’s for pleasure, to heal my soul and help me go on with my life, then reading has to be special. I have to have the right light, my best position, and mainly privacy. I love to read by myself.
Anyway, back to that September. What was so special about it? We went to another cycle of school life. The 5th grade, what today we call gymnasium, and at that time did not have a name, at least I can’t remember it, we started to learn with different teachers for the various subjects. And there was a class or form master or mistress who was offering guidance for us, the kids, and support for the parents who needed it. The big issue was that we started to learn a foreign language and the only one available officially in schools at the time was Russian. Which was a lovely language, and as kids we didn’t really have ideology issues. Those were the heroic times of post second world war, now almost forgotten by the very young, when we watched mostly war movies on TV, and we were playing them in the back of our block-of-flats, when the Nazis were the enemy and the Russians, the partisans, the good guys. Russian ballet and music were all I could remember around me. But what does a 12 year old really remember or is interested in? I was learning German at home, had been doing so since I was eight, and was dreaming to become a cosmonaut which later on I discovered is the Russian for an astronaut. I read tones of books written by Russian writers — obviously those we could find on the market. And that was my world, my universe, never thought there was anything else except Andersen’s and Grimm’s Märchen that my beloved Tante Erna, my German private teacher, would teach me how to draw and how to retell. And then I went to school and my form teacher, comrade Pană, a geography teacher, came in and told us that we could pick the language we wanted to learn. You could choose among Russian, German, French and English — she said. We looked at each other in confusion. Thirty kids that, probably, had never been prepared for such a choice. And, of course, most of us said we wanted Russian. Those who already were learning a language, like myself, we wanted to learn a new one. And anyway, Russian was the language of the day. Yes, we almost all wanted to learn Russian. Except maybe five or six kids, who were too embarrassed to say anything aloud.
Comrade Pană looked at us and said quietly: “No need to decide now. Go home and tell your parents. You let me know tomorrow.”
I went home. After school I went out and played and fought and yelled and did all the things that kids, mostly boys, do. When I was called in by mum, and told to do the evening chores, I remembered I had to make a choice. So I told mum about the languages.
‘What did you choose?’ she asked.
‘Russian, of course. You know I started learning the alphabet during the holiday, I have my little copybook and … I’ll be a good pupil.’
‘We’ll see about that’, mum answered rather harshly. ‘Go to bed now.’
I heard my parents talking in the kitchen until late at night in a low voice. I didn’t pay any attention — they were usually doing that. In the morning before going to school mum told me: ‘you’re going to study English’. I was devastated. The shame and the fear of what my Friends would say. ‘I can’t mum. I’ll be the only one to pick English. I don’t want to, please, please.’ She didn’t say much. She never did. ‘Just do what I told you.’
So, I went to school. Unhappy in the intense way only children can be unhappy and totally embarrassed about my virtual promise to the others, my “honour”, my need to stick together with the rest of the class, my readiness to put up a fight with those daring to challenge me for the right of changing my mind. When the comrade teacher asked us what the language of our choice was, about seven kids chose Russian. The rest went for English and French.
I made a career out of English. And a pretty good one for that matter. Lots of people kept asking me where I learned my English. What can I answer? In Romania. And guess what — I never learned any Russian. I can’t read, can’t speak the language, obviously can’t write in it though I love Russian culture. You’re kidding us — of course you speak Russian. You had to. It was compulsory in those days. No, I did not have to. I was the first generation that could choose. I didn’t know then, but my parents, particularly my mum, I guess, chose for me. As I chose later Spanish for my own kids as a second language. But that is another story.
And so when I had to fill in in the many versions of my profesional CVs the languages I speak and the level of proficiency I developed I always forgot to write my mother’s tongue. Until recently when I started to realize that her language is a profound part of myself that will always stay with me and emerge when I am among people who speak it.
