Domnica Radulescu’s 2008 Train to Trieste is an example of the
genre dealing with life in communist Romania and emigrating to escape it,
allowing comparisons to be made with both an insider’s and an outsider’s
perspective: other examples are Herta Müller’s The Passport, Roxanne Veletzos’s The Girl They Left Behind, and Ioana Pârvulescu’s short story ‘A Voice’. Train to Trieste charts the life of Mona Maria Manoliu as she grows
up in Romania, moves to Chicago in her twenties, then in a short final section
returns to Romania two decades later to seek answers to old questions – and receives
a remarkable surprise.
Living in Bucharest with her
parents, teenage Mona spends her holidays in the Carpathian city of Brașov with
her aunt, uncle and cousins, and at the age of 17, in 1977, falls in love with
the enigmatic and older Mihai, whom she sees on her visits. He disapproves of her anti-regime sentiments,
and starts wearing a leather jacket, a garment favoured by the Securitate; then
she is warned by another woman to be careful of him as he has links to the
secret police. She wonders to what
extent she can trust him.
Her father, a university
lecturer, is part of a dissident group, which makes life increasingly difficult
for him, and for Mona, as family members too are treated with suspicion. People are having ‘accidents’ in the street,
her father is arrested and beaten, then demoted, and she herself is routinely followed
and has a frightening encounter with a menacing government goon. Following her love for literature she uses
the British and American libraries in Bucharest, further casting her loyalty in
doubt.
In her early twenties life has become
so difficult that Mona’s family decide she should leave Romania. She escapes via Belgrade to Trieste, then on
to Chicago as part of a sponsorship programme, helped by incredibly kind and
selfless people along the way. Her journey
to Chicago mirrors that of Radulescu’s own in 1983, and is a similar trajectory
to Veletzos, who was born in Bucharest and moved to California as a young woman.
Mona does not say goodbye to Mihai, but he
had been such a significant part of her life that she is shocked to hear later that
he was killed on Christmas Day 1989, shot by a random bullet in the street.
In Chicago Mona makes a life for
herself, putting her Romanian past behind her.
She works hard, gets married, has children, gets divorced, takes
degrees, her parents join her, she moves to Indiana to take a teaching job,
Ceaușescu is overthrown, her beloved father dies. She decides to visit Romania after a gap of
twenty years, both vicariously for her father, who never really took to America
and longed to return to the old country one last time, and on her own account,
to find answers to nagging questions about the past.
Despite the book’s title she does
not take the train to Trieste when leaving Romania because the chance of
detection is too high, rather hitching a ride with an Italian in his little
Fiat and passing as his wife. On her
return trip, though, she does take the train, but in the opposite
direction. Her visit enables her to clear
up mysteries about her father, Mihai, other people in their circle, and her
escape, in a lengthy and rather clumsily presented conversation with an old
friend of Mihai’s. The poignant ending
promises the opening of a new chapter, and the final integration of her
Romanian and American identities.
It is impossible to tell the
extent to which we are reading a novel or autobiography, or something in
between. The early sections feel
fictional, but once Mona moves to America the writing takes on the character of
memoir; or perhaps it always had that character, but life under Ceaușescu was
so strange it is bound to feel like fiction to an outsider. She conveys the political situation and what
everyday life was like in Bucharest and Brașov in the 1970s and ’80s, but the
writing is particularly vivid when describing family life and the beauty of the
Carpathians.
Mona is not impressed with
post-Ceaușescu Romania, expressing the disappointment shared by those who, like
her father, had opposed the communist regime, at how little had changed in the
years following. But while she has a
good life in America, she also retains a certain ambivalence towards her
adopted homeland. This is symbolised in
the references to food: the tastiness of Romanian home cooking versus the
terrible quality of mass-produced food in the land of McDonald’s.
A key moment in the novel is
writing a competition essay at the age of ten on why she loves her
country. Mona thinks about the
melancholic longing expressed in the supposedly untranslatable word dor, a more profound emotion than
nostalgia and part of the way Romanians define themselves. Her essay conveys how she would feel should
she lose her country by imagining the lost past she has heard about from her
father (suitably edited for an official audience). Sentiments clearly chiming with the judges,
she wins first prize. She may not think
much about the word in America, but it is there, inside her. In a sense, despite moving across the
Atlantic she never leaves Romania at all.
