Lalaland
THE GANG
Yes, I got used to being called a Dracula Baby because I’m from Transylvania1, a region in north-central Romania.
My name is Ilana.
It was 1958, and the town was Cluj2. This may very well be my first memory in this world: Immaculate white snow covers everything, and it's still snowing. I can barely hear the sound of our moving truck making its way up the street. The gasoline smell in the truck’s cab and the continuous movement make me drowsy and nauseous.
I had just turned three years old a few days before. My family was moving to a bigger house because my mother, Paula, expected the stork with a baby brother for me.
Somehow, the stork got confused by the move and delivered a baby girl instead of a boy. It was evident to me—the stork brought us the wrong baby — but Mom and Dad didn’t seem to mind.
I took the sailor doll out of my toy box, and with him in my arms I patiently waited months for the stork to fix the error. It just never happened.
The little girl my parents called Ioana was cute and soft and fat, and Mom spent a lot of time with her. She was just too adorable not to love.
The weather warmed up, and the fresh green grass made a soft blanket over most of the front yard and around the sandbox. In the dark of the evergreen’s shade were many delicate lilies of the valley, and rosehip3 bushes in the sun. I miss my mom’s rosehip jam—the velvety texture and the sweet-and-sour taste.
The large garden in the back had fruit trees, gooseberry, and currant bushes. Every morning I sat down in the grass just to watch them bud, flower, and make new ruby-red droplets of deliciously sour fruit. I never saw it happen, but the following day there were more of them and bigger. Amazing!
This was our world. We played all day, mainly in the front so Mom could keep an eye on us from the kitchen window. When I say our world, I mean the four other children living in the same apartment house with my sister Ioana and myself. The yard was “our reality” and had nothing to do with the outside world.
Above us lived Coca, an old friend of my mom’s, and her son, Tony. We called him Zgîilă4, who was just a few months older than me. He looked like a starving angel: curly thick ash-blond hair, no meat on his bones, and full of scabs from all the adventures of his young life. Many a time, my mom had him over for dinner when Tony’s mom was late. Tony ran faster than me, climbed higher than me in all the trees, and he was my buddy.
An Orthodox priest and his wife lived next door. Their little granddaughter Ioana Varna, daughter of a celebrated pediatric orthopedic surgeon in our town, lived with them for most of the year. We called her simply Ioana because my little sister ended up being Ioana-mica (“Mica” in Romanian means “small”). She was almost an albino, with blue eyes slightly bulging and the whitest skin I have ever seen. Her sandwiches were white bread with butter and apricot preserves, while mine were homemade dark bread with dark plum preserves. Her hair was light blond; mine was dirty blond. Her boots were tan, mine brown. I dreamed for years to have a pair of tan boots.
The Koslov family lived above the Varnas with their daughters Liana and Michaela. Liana was a sweet, chubby girl who was a little older than us and very rarely came out to play. Her older sister, Michaela, was considerably older than us and was way out of our league. She never had anything to do with us.
THE ELEPHANT’S CHILD
Asking questions was and remains my favourite way of conversing. Eventually, my husband found the answer to all my questions: “Ask Mr. Google”. He endearingly calls me “the elephant’s child5".
By the time I was three and a half, my mom had enough of my incessant questions. To get some peace in the house for a few hours a day, she decided to send me to kindergarten. To make sure I wouldn’t be sent home with a sock in my mouth, she sent me to a Hungarian school to no be able to ask my questions. On my first day, I stood by the kindergarten’s room door, where our maid, Ana, left me. Upon returning home, I told my mom that I didn’t understand anything, as if they were all speaking Hungarian. My mom laughed so hard she said they were all indeed speaking Hungarian.
That’s Ileana, at the age of two going on fourteen, in a Hungarian folk costume with a doll in the same type of outfit. See how careful my mother was to make my hair look good?
Before long, I was speaking Hungarian half the time, which gave my mom another idea. A very old Jewish-German lady named Tante Lili lived at the corner of our street. She was crippled, with one short leg and a hump. So, every day after kindergarten, I had to go to Tante Lili to learn German. She lived in a strange, pre-war building that had a grocery store on the ground floor. The building looked anchored to the cliff behind it, and I had to climb 32 exterior cement steps to get up to her apartment. I imagine she had only climbed them once when she moved in, and I don’t think she ever went out again.
I only remember a few things about the four years I spent time with Tante Lili. She always had a small crescent-shaped dry French bread that was hard as stone. She would cut little slices off of it and suck on each until it got soft enough to chew with her prosthetic teeth. She had a very beautiful old dresser with a top drawer that I was allowed to explore. It was filled with fascinating and bizarre objects like old military medals, pins, and broaches. An old yarmulke6 was upside down, filled with buttons that seemed magical to me. There was a particularly interesting one: a dark navy button with an elegant golden anchor encrusted. Since I obviously loved it, Tante Lili let me have it. I took my new treasure home to show Mom, and… she made me take it back. She didn’t believe that Tante Lili had given it to me but thought I had stolen it. I didn’t quite understand what I had done wrong, but Mom made me feel very ashamed. My cheeks all red, and tears in my eyes, I returned the beautiful button apologizing to Tante Lili.
“What are you apologizing for?” she asked me.
“I don’t know, but I think I shouldn’t want other people’s stuff. So, mom asked me to give it back to you.”
That was the closest I ever got to stealing, and Mom didn’t miss the opportunity to teach me a lesson.
For the rest of my life, I did all I could to avoid the shame and embarrassment I felt that day. Also, to this day, I collect buttons. I have all the spares that came with every single garment I ever bought.
HUSHKIA
As time went by, Ioana-mica grew into a walking, talking little girl who wanted nothing else but play with us ‘big kids.’ The cute little bundle of joy was ready to do anything to please us, so we invented a silly game named Hushkia. Why Hushkia? I have no idea. The game consisted of all of us running away from the Hushkia for hours at a time. Between the ages of two and five, Ioana-mica was the Hushkia every single time we played the game, and we played the game almost every day. It’s hard to believe that we persuaded her to be ‘it’ every time, but I guess it was that important to her to play with the big kids.
She stood in front of the house and waited for us to run around the house — she was too young to count to ten — and then started after us. Of course, she couldn’t possibly catch us, but the whole point of the game was our screams of excitement and the giggling when we looked around a corner of the house and saw her. She never cried or complained. What a trouper, my little sister Ioana!
At a very young age, around four years old, my sister began periodically developing purple marks on the front of her neck that looked like pinpricks. This concerned my parents, so they took her to a doctor. She was diagnosed as suffering from thrombocytopenia or an abnormally low level of platelets in her blood. As a result, she required frequent transfusions, which the whole family willingly gave her. Because of this condition, the doctors deemed her ‘fragile’, which exempted her from any physical exertion or punishment. Unfortunately, this led to her being pampered to excess and eventually led to personality traits that did not serve her well throughout her life.
SMOKING
Like any other day, after breakfast, Mom would send us — me, Tony, Ioana, and Ioana-mica — out to play so she and Ana could get some work done around the house. The two of them cleaned, cooked, washed, and ironed every day from morning to dusk. One beautiful late spring day, warm enough to wear shorts, we were all out in the yard planning the day. I was six years old. One of us, probably me, decided that we should smoke cigarettes! Hell, yes! So, what if we don’t have any? We can figure it out.
We walked the street collecting cigarette butts from the sidewalk and snuck down to our cellar with the harvest in our pockets. The house had a basement where each family had a separate cellar. An old, oil-stained newspaper was on the floor under the steps along with a broken bicycle, forgotten there by Michaela’s father, who had given up on fixing it. All the windows were open, along with the entry door to our apartment. We could hear my mom chopping spinach in the kitchen, a great way to keep track of her whereabouts.
We ripped open each butt and freed the stinky tobacco at the unburned end—you know, the nasty end full of all tar and dried saliva of the smoker) Once we got a small pile, we wondered: What are we going to use for paper?
Ah, there was the filthy old newspaper under the bike! What luck! We ripped pieces from the newspaper’s edges and made cigarettes for all four of us. Being ‘responsible’ kids, and at my thoughtful suggestion, we gave my little sister Ioana-mica less tobacco—since she was still a toddler in diapers. Hers was mostly just rolled greasy paper with very little tobacco. We lit them in this order: Tony, me, Ioana, and Ioana-mica.
It was all fascinating, so exciting that we didn’t realize that the clonking of my mother’s woodchopper on the butcher block had stopped. At her end, Mom realized that we were way too quiet. She quietly left the kitchen to investigate and heard us murmuring at the bottom of the cellar stairs. She silently came down the steps and was horrified by what she saw!
Ioana-mica’s cigarette had just been lit and was burning between her tiny fat fingers like a candle. Ioana had just put the cigarette in her mouth when it made a slight explosive poof and covered the bottom part of her face with black soot. I stepped on mine when I saw Mom, and Tony stuffed his lit cigarette in his pocket where it promptly caught his shorts on fire.
Of course, I thought I was the clever one, but that backfired on me completely. While all the others scampered up the stairs, I couldn’t move, or I would reveal the cigarette I had stepped on, the corpus delicti. So, while the others ran to safety, I was caught by my mother. She beat for the whole gang. Not so clever after all…
FAMILY
Mom, Paulina (but everybody called her Paula), came of age in tough times. The older of two girls, she was born in 1922, which meant that she was a beautiful girl in her 20s—during the Second World War. The Germans and the Hungarians, ravaging their way east, passed through the Cluj area, so my grandfather, a miller from Suceag, married her to an older yet well-positioned gentleman who lived in Cluj, just to get her out of harm’s way.
Paulina was a well-educated woman. She went to a very prestigious girls’ school in Cluj and worked for a while as a schoolteacher.
In 1943 she had a son named Virgil (Gilu-Lulu). Lulu was a beautiful boy with blue eyes and curly dark blond hair. He was very studious, so Mom sent him to school before he was even six. At that time, immediately after the war, in Romania, the general education school was only 10 years, so he finished high school at the age of 16 and immediately went to medical school. He became a doctor in 1966, specializing in cancer pathology.
My Grand Ilarie, Mom and Granny, Ileana
After Paulina and Lulu’s father divorced, Lulu lived with his father. A few years later, Paulina married again, to a man six years younger than herself. This man became my father.
My dad was only 15 years older than Lulu and always treated him like a friend. They even called each other by first names. Dad would help him any way he could. For instance, 7 January, Saint John’s Day, was my father’s name day. Every year on this day, our house was full of flower arrangements sent by his friends and work colleagues. The next day, my dad would send a car to take Lulu and all those baskets and arrangements to the farmer’s market to sell and make some pocket money for himself.
Lulu was a great guy, played rugby, and often came to see us girls. As far back as I remember, a week or so before Christmas, my dad would send home a fresh Christmas tree— usually a Douglas fir. It was temporarily stored outside on the back balcony.
Mom went outside on Christmas Eve day one particular year, to get the tree — and it was gone! Oh, my God! She made such a tragedy of this. One would have thought she had lost a fortune! So, Dad had his driver bring another tree, and on that Christmas Eve, we had a real Santa come to the house. Mom had been so upset because she had arranged with Lulu to come dressed as Santa and give us two girls a Christmas to remember. And I do remember it! Of course, I’m writing about it now, aren’t I?
My dad was 27 years old when I was born. At that time, we lived in Turda7, in a construction trailer on a site where he was working as a chief construction engineer. We only had half of the trailer, the other half being barracks for the workers.
Due to his ‘problematic’ origin—being the son of a Chiabur8—my father wasn’t a member of the Communist Party until much later in life[2]. At that point, the Party needed him in a position of very high authority and had to make him a member. Dad never had a political position; he was always the ‘vice-president’. He was always the executive individual who actually worked and made all the professional decisions. At the same time, the president was the ‘strawman’ political puppet. For several years, my dad also represented Romania at the United Nations, as the leader of the architectural/construction section of the UN, and at the Comecon (CAER9) [3].
My dad and my mom
To my dad, I was the son he never had. He was my biggest supporter and president of my fan club. I didn’t have to ask for anything. He knew what I wanted, and he would do anything for me. By the time I was a teenager, he had trusted my judgment enough that, when he had an ethical dilemma or a logical issue from work, he would talk it over with me. He had a great sense of humour and was a great athlete.
He was 5’9,” with dark hair, blue eyes, and a moustache, and was always dapper in a bowtie. Dad was a man of exceptional intelligence and such humanity, compassion, sensibility, and accomplishment. He was very well known and respected, especially in Cluj and in Transylvania in general.
When I was a child, walking with him on the street, I saw mature men bow to him and kiss his hand.
In the later years, when we lost him in 1984, the town’s soccer team, Universitatea Cluj, carried his casket on their shoulders across town draped with the Club’s flag.
1 Transylvania, Bram Stoker’s Dracula setting, was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire for more than 1,000 years. It’s been said that Transylvania sits on one of Earth’s strongest magnetic fields and its people, as a result, have extra-sensory perception.
2 Cluj is the second-biggest town in Romania and is the cultural center of Transylvania. In 1974 it was named by the communists as “Cluj-Napoca.”
3 Rosehip (Rosa canina), also known as “The wild rose,” is a wild plant of the Rosaceae family. It can reach a height of two to three meters and has both the qualities of a decorative plant and a medicinal plant.
4 Zgîilă [“zgeela”] is the Romanian word for “scrawny.”
5 The Elephant’s Child by Rudyard Kipling. Because of his “satiable curiosity,” the theme of this short story is that curiosity can open up new abilities, ideas, and knowledge.
6 yar·mul·ke — a skullcap worn in public by Orthodox Jewish men or during prayer by other Jewish men.
7 Turda is located 30 km southeast of Cluj. Known in antiquity under the name Potaissa is first recorded on a Roman milliarium discovered in 1758.
8 Chiabur means ‘“well off’” and is a term by which, during the communist period—a rich peasant who belonged to the village bourgeoisie, owned more land than he could work alone, had important means of production and used wage labour.
9 Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon—Consiliul de Ajutor Economic Reciproc) Mutual Economic Aid Council was created at the initiative of the USSR in 1949 as an economic organization of the European communist states to constitute an equivalent of the OECE (European Organization for Economic Cooperation). The CAER was the Eastern Bloc’s answer to the Marshall Plan.
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