My mother, Norah, was given the job at the movie theater because nobody else in our neighborhood wanted it. In a small Romanian city in the 1950s, to run the movie theater meant to be closely scrutinized by the Party’s cultural commissar, whom people not only mistrusted but feared. Families like ours, hoping month by month to escape to Israel, had a special reason to avoid the local authorities. But Norah, who didn’t know the commissar, was glad for the challenge, and to celebrate, she bought sugar on the black market to make Turkish halva.
The commissar told Norah that working for the Party was an honor, then sent her to the people’s warehouse, where goods requisitioned from bourgeois enemies were available to the revolutionary working class. Norah found a film projector, 104 chairs (no two alike), theater curtains, a discarded billboard, and an old van. The requisitions commissar offered her an ornate Venetian mirror that he himself had taken from the house of some bourgeois enemy. “If you want it for the theater you should take it,” he said. “You don’t even have to put it on the list. Just give me something in exchange.” Norah declined the offer.
During the same week, the Party’s employment agency hired three more people to work at the movie theater: Silvia, a painter; Dima, a driver; and Victoria, a cashier. Norah met her new comrades in front of the kiosk, the place in town where the Party sold bread. They shook hands; exchanged some information about themselves, their families, their former jobs; told some jokes; then went to see Comrade Nico, the Commissar of Art, Culture, and
Education.
* * *
Silvia was tall and slender, with big blue eyes and soft blonde hair. With her hair tied up in two braids, she was the image of the perfect Aryan German girl, as seen in the Nazi propaganda posters, but it turned out that she was one of us. Her face was round and delicate except for a raised, horizontal scar beneath the bridge of her nose. It was a nose with character. When I asked her about the scar, she touched it and laughingly told me that it was her lucky mark. “I used to have a different nose,” she said, “a little wider, with a large bump. When the anti-Semitic laws were passed, a crooked nose was enough to get you arrested. A dentist friend of mine agreed to cut the bump on my nose to make it smaller.”
The dentist, who was forbidden to treat Jews, had performed the surgery at some risk. After the transformation, Silvia obtained false identification papers from a friend and moved to the capital city. She rented a room from people she trusted and found a job painting dishes at the porcelain factory. In the city the hunting for Jews became systematic. Silvia was forewarned before the police made their house-to-house rounds to register the Jews on each street. She prepared for the visit in advance. She heated her room and put on a summer dress that was a little too tight. Her braids tied with red ribbons gave her the look of a mischievous teenager. When a policeman knocked at her door, Silvia invited him inside. Wearing an oversized winter uniform and appearing a little shy, he took off his cap and shifted from one foot to the other, asking to see her identity cards. Silvia called the other girls from their rooms, and they all sat down to talk. He showed them the required form to be filled out by Jews, foreigners, gypsies, and other people not registered with the police. Silvia’s working permit was very recent and described her as a refugee, but a Romanian refugee. She had the right to travel, work, and receive food coupons.
“Why did you leave your home, Miss Silvia?” the policeman asked.
“What can we do, My Captain? My poor mother is dead, my father is fighting in the war, and I came to stay with my cousins,” she said, looking into the policeman’s eyes. “I am afraid to be at home alone.”
“We are all afraid to live alone,” Silvia’s friends added. “Don’t you see how many strangers are in the city?”
“Adevarat, true,” the policeman felt obliged to say. “Times are difficult. I also left home and am here alone.”
“Then you should come to visit us,” one of the girls said. “We are scared. Sa ne ajute Dumnezeu, God help us!”
“Da Dumneavoastra domnisoara Silvia, ce fel de religie aveti? But you, Miss Silvia, what kind of religion do you have?”
Silvia was taken aback and glanced at her friends in fear.
“Why don’t you ask me?” one of the girls chimed in. “You ask her because she is the prettiest one, right?”
The captain blushed. The girls giggled.
Your book looks interesting. Is it available at local bookstores? I hope your reading scheduled for February 10 gets rescheduled.