Each building contained apartments of different sizes. Lower-middle-class people lived in two-room apartments, middle-class people in three-room apartments, and wealthy people in four-room apartments. (This calculation omitted kitchens, which were usually tiny.) Andrei’s parents, the Lencu
I was going to be sleeping in the living room. Long couches, meeting in an L, lined two walls of the room. The wall opposite the larger couch was blocked from sight by a huge wall unit concealing a multitude of shelves and cupboards behind glossy imitation-wood doors. The wall opposite the smaller couch was a French window leading to a tin-roofed balcony with a sweeping seventh-floor view of rows of high rises hinged at right angles, dusty yard space and, discernible in the gaps between the buildings, the blurred green horizons of faraway hills. The living room was dominated by a very large black television sitting asquat a high table in front of the French window at an angle making the screen watchable from both couches. The larger couch, its cushions and armrests a startling purple velvet, unfolded into the bed where I was to sleep. Searching for a space where I could keep my clothes and books, Dora flipped up a section of the couch hooding a small compartment. Her shoulders stiffened against the fabric of her voluminous blue-patterned summer dress. It was obvious the space, filled with immaculately folded sheets, wasn’t big enough for my belongings. But what had brought her up short, lying on top of the sheets, was a framed colour photograph.
The photograph showed three smiling, close-set faces—woman, man, child. The fierce, low-browed man was Andrei. Then I realized it couldn’t be Andrei because the black-haired, pugnacious child was patently a near-infant Andrei. The woman was lean, angular, Slavic-looking, her blond hair thick; only the curl of her smile allowed me to grasp that this was how Dora had looked at twenty-five. The man, bearing such an eerie resemblance to Andrei, could only be…
Dora and Andrei stood in hunched silence. Andrei, staring straight down at the oversize curlicues of the pattern in the carpet, seemed distraught. Dora met my eyes with an ashamed expression. “Domnul Steve,” she said, “I had another family before this family. But there were problems in this family. Later I married Senya, who is a good papi… Andrei’s little brother has a different father from Andrei.”
Dora looked mortified. Andrei’s robust body had deflated, his shoulders sagging.
“I understand,” I said. “For us this is normal. My brother and I have different mothers.”
“It happens in your countries, as well?” Dora asked. “I thought you didn’t have these problems.”
“It happens everywhere. Some marriages don’t work.”
The atmosphere was transformed. Dora smiled and cleared two shelves in the wall unit for me with exuberant sweeps of her arms. I unpacked my clothes and books, while Andrei watched to see what treasures I would disgorge. Dora picked out those of my shirts appropriate for teaching and took them away to wash and iron. Later that summer Dora made guarded allusions to her first husband’s heavy drinking and “bad behaviour,” which I took to mean either infidelity or domestic violence. The family dynamics helped explain Andrei’s attachment to Russian culture. Dora had been born into a large Romanian-speaking family in C
I met Andrei’s stepfather that evening. Simion Lencu
My age had taken the family by surprise: they had been expecting a student. I explained I had recently returned to being a student after having worked for a number of years. “Sometimes in our society it’s necessary for adults to get new qualifications,” I said. “Anyway, we all get old.”
“Da.” Senya echoed my words: “Toi imbâtrinesc.” His ironic smile barely nudged a face that had dulled and stiffened. Life had not been easy for Senya. He had been born the youngest of five children in a small town near B