Chapter Twenty-Nine

The March sun warmed the air. April spent her days off at the park or taking Sierra to outdoor cafés rather than setting up another interview with Luca. She could almost see him growing frailer before her eyes. Unquestionably, it was the memories taking a toll on him. There didn’t seem much more of the story to tell anyway since he wasn’t willing to discuss prison.

Finally, Luca called her and asked when she was coming. She paused. There was no point in stalling. “Today,” she said.

He led her into his backyard, where the grass had come to life, sparrows chirped, and the pear tree near the kitchen was beginning to flower. His yard gave her a taste of Eden. She could only hope the lovely weather would keep his mind from straying too long near the world of his Romanian prison.

“Are you sure?” she asked him one last time, as she took a patio chair across from him.

“I am sure.” She turned on the recorder.

He cupped something in his hands—a piece of newsprint, she thought—as he began to speak, carrying her back to the Romania of 1976.

“It was a simple decision to make. Nicu was young, and he needed his mother. Tatia would never survive prison. I left the hospital and turned myself in to the authorities waiting outside. I told them, ‘She did not want to speak of God to children. I made her do it. And because she loved me, she did so.’

“I cannot say if they believed me. I think they did not. But they agreed to let her return home to Nicu, and I was sentenced to five years of reeducation. That is what they called imprisonment. I did not even get to say good-bye to them.”

Luca paused and began to talk again.

“My cell mates were priests and missionaries imprisoned for preaching illegal sermons and evangelizing Romanian youth, political dissenters, men who had kept secret printing presses and held revolutionary meetings. I had no place there. Who was I? Only a man who had tried to protect his wife and son.”

April smoothed her skirt and started to switch off the recorder.

“Are you done so soon?” he said with a tinge of amusement in his voice.

“You said you would not talk of prison, Luca.”

“I did say this, but we are telling the story for Nicolae. The story will mean nothing without this part.”

“Luca? You’ve exhausted yourself already.” It was true. His face was gray, and he hadn’t even told her of the torture to come.

But he stood and trained his eyes on her. “I am too exhausted, am I? Exhausted?” He leaned on the back of his chair. “You are right. I am weary. Five years I spent in prison, and it has consumed the remaining years of my life! I am exhausted from turning my head from those memories. I will face them now.”

She sank farther into the patio chair as he stood up and paced in a circle. She had never seen Luca so passionate.

The sky clouded over, and a chilly breeze raised the hair on her arms.

Luca looked at the sky with wry amusement. “I am going to tell what happened in prison,” he said in a hoarse voice. “Will you listen?”

April nodded, her throat dry. “Of course, Luca.”

He came back to his chair and turned the newsprint carefully over in his hands.

“You think at first there is some inner core no horror can touch. My body became ill from a diet of oily soups made from rotten vegetables. Bread was given only once a week. I had diarrhea. There was no privacy. My cell mates had seen it all before, but I tried to find some bit of self-respect.

“‘It is no use,’ a man in the corner of his cell said to me. He seemed very old, but they all did. It only takes a year, a few months of prison, to bring a young man to old age. ‘If you will survive here,’ he said, ‘you will do it by accepting there is nothing left for you. No health. No wholeness as you know it.’

“I glared at him. If I was to survive for my family, I should have to be very strong. How dare this man discourage me before I began to try?

“‘Our only strength here,’ he said, ‘is to be the broken body of Christ.’ I learned later he was an Orthodox priest, Father Mihael.

“At night, men sobbed. They prayed aloud. They called out to their wives and mothers. But other men reached out. They held the sobbing men like babies. And when I was that man, when I came from being beaten, when I cried out in my sleep for Tatia, it was my turn to be held and prayed over.

“The guards forced us to stand with backpacks full of rocks all day long. They made us lie with four men on top of us. They beat us. In winter, they put us in cells with ice dripping from the walls. They commanded us to jog for ten hours, twenty hours. They would entice prisoners with the lure of freedom if they would beat other prisoners or urinate on them.

“They forced me to say that I and my friends were guilty of dozens of violent crimes by questioning and threatening for hours, days sometimes, until I began to believe it was possible I had done every terrible thing they said I had done. I lost my name and became only a number.

“They took pleasure in breaking us. Father Mihael was right. You could hold on to nothing worth having. I was angry I was not braver. I was humiliated for the men who cried out and for the men who held them.

“The first Sunday, the guards gave out bread. I was so hungry, I almost swallowed my piece whole. I did not even taste it. But most held on to their bread. This was to make it last, I thought. Then Father Mihael began to say a prayer, and each man brought his bread to him, and he blessed it. In this terrible place they were having the Eucharist!

“One man turned to me, tore off a chunk, and offered it. I looked at it greedily, wanting to fill my stomach with one more piece of bread, but I shook my head. This was idiocy.

“I listened to their prayers, but I felt I should go insane if I joined them. How could one think of God in a place He had abandoned to the devil?

“So I worked out difficult equations. I recited passages of poetry I recalled. Above all, I remembered Tatia and Nicu. My only prayer was for their safety.

“I had been in prison for some time. I cannot say for how long, because days were lost to me. One of the guards came to visit me.

“‘Your family is dead,’ he said. ‘They are no more.’ And he walked out.

“Tatia and Nicu ... They were all I had been holding on for. I had foolishly believed I could protect my family, and now they were dead. I was already broken. What was left to break? There had been a small part of me holding on, hoping I could survive for them until I was freed. This part of me was now gone. I was thankful. I could surrender to death now.”

April kneaded her hands together. Luca’s eyes faded. His shoulders slumped. She could see that living through the memory again had cost him.

“Luca, you can stop now. If you want.”

He didn’t seem to hear her. He seemed locked in his prison. But he must have decided that the only way to freedom was to find the other side of the memory.

He sighed and began speaking again.

“There were saints in my cell. When a broken man was called for a beating, a stronger man would pretend to be him. When one man went insane, others brought him back with their care. They even prayed for the guards who beat us. But I was not a saint. I wanted only to die. You think when you live in such a place all you must do is give up. Illness and death surrounded me. Torture was daily.

“I provoked the guards for extra beatings. I gave other men my soup. It would be soon. But I did not die. My body, young and still strong, refused to cooperate.

“In my sleep, I heard a boy crying. I woke thinking Nicu was in the other bedroom. I wanted to go to him, but I had no strength to get up. Then I realized it was not a boy crying. It was me.

“Father Mihael handed bread to me and made the sign of the cross. ‘Confess your sins, Luca. You can find God’s goodness in this place, most especially in this place.’ Thinking of the secret communion after my wedding, I confessed my sins and ate. He handed me his water. ‘We have no wine, but Christ is able to turn water into wine, if He chooses.’

“If I was unable to die, I did not take to life either. I am like the hermits of old, I thought. I will give myself to prayer. I thought of Tatia teaching Nicu his prayers. And I found solace in the prayers, but I was not a saint.”

“You sacrificed yourself for your family!” April said. “You endured that terrible place without turning against God. Isn’t that enough for sainthood?”

He let out a bleak laugh. “To be a saint, one must overcome the world. I overcame nothing.”

As if speaking to the trees, he turned away from her and went on with his story.

“The guards mostly ignored the religious services. But there was one who liked to provoke us. One day he came into our cell with … it was sacrilege. Human waste.

“‘Bless this, Father,’ he said. ‘Here is the holy Eucharist.’ Father Mihael did not move. His eyes, large in his thin face, were full of pity for the guard. The priest stayed very still. Only his lips moved in a quiet prayer.

“After some time of yelling and coercing, the guard saw Father Mihael would not be threatened into blessing it, and he began to beat him in front of us all. I sat by and allowed it. What choice did we have in such a place? But I thought of Father Mihael’s wife and children—four sons and a daughter—whom he prayed for daily. At the crack of splitting bone and the sound of his head hitting the stone floor, I thought of them.

“The guard stood to wipe the sweat from his face, and something came alive in me. My arms and legs found strength. I moved quickly. When he looked back, I stood between him and Father Mihael.

“The guard laughed at my small act of bravery and tried to shove me away, but the harder he tried to reach Father Mihael, the more determined I became. The priest was forgotten. He turned his attention to me.

“‘You want to be a martyr. Very well,’ he said to me.

“The guards tied rope around my hands until they burned, and they secured me to the beams above, with my hands stretched out and my feet together. ‘You are a martyr now,’ they laughed. ‘Just like your Jesus.’

“I felt the struggle to breathe, the bruising of my ribs, the stinging of my hands against the rope. I will die now, I thought, but my lungs refused to stop fighting for air.

“The men, the priests and the Christians, prayed under me and over Father Mihael lying wounded on the floor. They recited the Beatitudes and the Psalms and prayers recounting the passion of our Lord. They prayed through the afternoon and then the night and the next day without sleep. Even now, I wake sometimes hearing the sound of those prayers.

“The evening guards took me down, I tried to spread my arms, but they would not lift.

“‘You have not killed me,’ I wanted to say. ‘Only God can take my life.’ But my tongue was swollen, and the guards laughed at the croak that came out of my mouth.”

April started to speak, but she could find nothing to say. She blinked away her tears. What could she possibly say? So she only reached out to him and covered his hand with her own.

He looked up at her blankly.

She opened his left hand, massaging the scars. “Luca. Oh, Luca.”

With his other hand, he offered her the newsprint. It took her a few minutes to gather enough strength to look at it. It was in Romanian. “What does it say?”

He looked off into space, not at the paper. In a raspy voice, he said, “‘Father Mihael Bălanescu died peacefully in his bed on the eighth of August, 2007.’ His son, a priest also, sent it to me.”

“You suffered for something so important, Luca. You gave him back to his family and to his church. When did the communist government fall? 1989? That’s almost twenty years he had because the guards didn’t kill him that night.”

She closed her eyes briefly and opened them to find Luca inspecting her. “I believe you know something of what I experienced,” he said.

She shook her head. It was an unworthy comparison. Coping with a depressed husband hardly ranked with five years of torture.

But he gave her a firm nod. “Sacrifice is sacrifice, however it is done.”