Four blocks from where the fat, legless Gypsy beggar angrily
tossed my son Joe’s offering of a piece of candy before she reached into her
underwear for her iPhone, Emily stands atop
the stone wall, looks over the ironwork and sees a 43-year-old man with long,
brown hair on the orphanage steps.
“Dad. I remember,” she says, emotion offering a bit
of gravel to her normally sprightly voice. “You were sitting right there, and I
crawled up the steps to you and you grabbed me and held me.”
The pigeons – and there are even more than there are members
of the Gypsy sidewalk freak show troupe – sing “woo-woo.” Perfect pitch.
Like in the chorus for The Rolling Stones “Sympathy for the Devil,” a
song which – even when I have seen Mick sing it in person -- still catapults me
to this land of narrow cobblestone
streets, plow-pulling mules and fields of sunflowers and hops.
Romania: The land that time forgot, where the clubs are
filled with those stuck in some sort of cigarette and martini Sinatra cool
while the peasants – pronounced “Pees-Ants” by those attempting English – suck
on second-hand cigarettes and navigate a hardscrabble life. If they are lucky they make it to Bucharest,
the capital. One million people were
there on my first visit in 1995. Ten million now. The children of salt miners and hops
harvesters know that if they can make it there they’ll make it anywhere. Of
course, most don’t. It’s difficult to
make any progress at all on roads planned by an evil dictator for 25,000
cars and trucks that now accommodate a million tiny, exhaust-plumed vehicles.
Getting ahead of myself, but for those of you who have never
been to Romania, let alone know where it is in the farthest reaches of Eastern
Europe, nestled against the tepid Black Sea, please allow me to introduce you
to it, a bit, at least. It is a poor land of mostly wondrous people and Gypsy
con artists. Watch your wallet and try not to meet the eyes of the beggars lest
you become sucked into some sort of deviant lifestyle.
After all, isn’t this the same country where Vlad the
Impaler, who drank his enemies’ blood, gave birth to the legend of Dracula?
Both are national heroes.
Vlad’s ancient fortress, still being excavated from layers
of dirt, Nazi troops and general abandonment, is right around the corner from
our hotel in Bucharest’s Old City. More pigeon “woo-woo” choruses can be heard --
at least in my mind -- as I stand at that fortress of blood and stare at the
age-worn statue of Mr. Vlad D. Impaler.
But on this day of fat and freakish beggars, we aren’t in
Bucharest. We are across the country, in a battered but brave college city
called Arad, filled with ancient churches and statues celebrating war heroes
who seemed to have saved Romania from everyone – the Hungarians, the Serbs, The
Nazis, the Commies, Matt Dillon and G.I. Joe. And the Hungarians who saved the
Romanians also are saluted. As are the Arad residents who hid Jews who escaped
from nearby Germany during crazy little Adolf’s reign of hate. How could such a little fart with a
licorice-stain mustache be considered the leader of the master race?
No answer though, at least not here, where Romanian cops tote
AK-47s while eating freshly twisted pretzel-like pastries filled with chocolate from the almost constant
series of storefront bakeries.
On this day, during our search for our children’s pasts, I
help hoist my daughter the three or four feet to the crown of the concrete and
stone wall so she can look over the ironwork and see the front steps of the
orphanage from which we adopted her 18 years ago.
The sudden flashback it spurs from her is the payoff for
this trip in which we search for something… Answers? Closure? The end of recurring
nightmares about old people staring in windows? Swallowed fear of abandonment?
Even though we’d planned for a year and I’d taken on as many
writing jobs as possible to help us from depleting all of our resources, we
really aren’t sure why we were here. Since we don’t know what to expect, why should we expect
anything at all?
It is mission with purpose, though, to help our kids
confront their pasts. But how do you do
that when, to us, their pasts only go back to the days we embraced them in the
orphanages?
Well, the only thing we knew was you can’t find those pasts
on Rochelle Drive in a tidy little middle-class section of Nashville called
Crieve Hall.
My kids were raised in this neighborhood of 1950s ranchers
and mature trees. But they were birthed
and abandoned in another world, in that country that always comes to mind when
I hear “Sympathy for the Devil.”
Our children – Emily, 19, and Joe, 17 – are all ours. Sometimes
I regret that my sense of ethics and never backing down nor bending over when
principles are challenged has perhaps hampered their material rewards. I just
hope they have learned about doing the right thing … and why the cost is worth
it. Besides, how many Xboxes does a kid need?
I’ve been their dad most of their lives. Before Suzanne and I met them, absorbing them
into our hearts, they existed. The existence? Perhaps not pretty. They were
abandoned by their mothers, perhaps for their own good I suppose, and spent
their first years in warehouse-like dormitories filled with cribs and chaos and
chicken pox and the stench of dirty diapers. In Emily’s case, when we first got
her 18 years ago, she was swaddled in plastic, sort of like a low-grade Hefty
kitchen trash bag, taped around her midsection.
Almost 15 years ago, Joe’s diapers were more conventional.
When we met him, he was naked from the waist up and his lower half was covered
by leggings. He wailed as Suzanne pulled them off and replaced them with
Pampers and American toddler clothes.
They don’t remember much, my beautiful babies.
But sometimes what they don’t remember hurts them. And they
don’t know why. Nor do we. We only know their lives since we went to Romania in
1995 for Emily – I remember Jerry Garcia died while we were in Bucharest back
that summer, only because the radio in the bus blasted about what a long,
strange trip it had been -- to my agreement – as I stepped out the door for
some bananas from a farmer.
We returned three
years later to adopt Joe, the kid the orphanage director scolded for crying,
cursing him in Romanian and tossing his last name at him like a weapon.
“Flagiu!” he shouted when the little boy resisted the two Americans who were
going to take him from the only home – disheveled, nicotine-stained and soiled as it may be – he had known since
his mother turned him over to the orphanage at six months of age. She lived in
a one-room house with a dirt floor, neither electric nor water. Several
families shared the “home.” She had
other children, but could not care for the kid who has become Joe. I think he’s better off. At least I hope so.
I was just 43 when I first entered this land where the
pigeons seemingly always coo the “woo-woo” punctuation of “Sympathy for the
Devil.” (Sometimes I’ll be walking alone on a Romanian street at night and I’ll
hear someone singing “Please allow me to introduce myself, I’m a man of wealth
and taste….” Except it’s in my head.)
My mission 18 years ago took Suzanne and I from Bucharest to
Arad – via the Orient Express and to a train station where men urinated openly while
rolling cigarettes and sharing liters of beer with naked youngsters. We were only in Arad
briefly, with our lawyer leading four couples past the guard shack – the guard
was smoking with a pal that day, I recall – and into the building where we
would first meet our babies and then take them down into the courtyard to play
briefly before choking down thick, boiled coffee and signing the legal adoption
papers.
Our daughter had been left in the hospital after she was
born. For almost two years she lived in
this orphanage.
Now, 18 years later, Emily gets to look again at that
courtyard where her life was changed. Where she became my kid. Where she
climbed into her Tata’s lap and smiled.
The guard shack is empty so there was no one to bribe with
American cigarettes on this visit.
As I watched the mixture of awe and shock on Emily’s face
the other day, images of life also flooded my brain. Inside these now-locked
gates – they are refurbishing the old orphanage to make it into a social
services building – I remembered clearly those first few moments with our 23-month-old
daughter.
I was one of four brand-new fathers on that journey and the
only man who did not frighten the little girls, who had been raised by an
all-female group of caretakers and administrators. The three other girls also sought me out on
that day, in that courtyard, on those steps.
Never knew why. Perhaps it was because of my long hair. Perhaps it’s
because beneath the bluster and profanity, I’m a relatively gentle human being.
Hell, for all I know it was the fact I didn’t smell bad. Or perhaps because I
did.
Of course, there was the one girl who changed me forever.
Perhaps I’ll return to that courtyard one day, I thought
back then. Because in addition to the
girls who were getting new homes in the U.S., there was this tow-headed boy,
maybe 2, wearing a ratty Cubs T-shirt. He kept grabbing my legs.
“Wish we could take him home, too,” I told Suzanne, who
tearfully agreed while she nestled our new daughter back in 1995.
Well, we didn’t get that boy. But it was because of that day
in the courtyard, the frightening and heart-swelling mixture of emotions, that
we did decide we wanted another child, boy or girl, from the orphanages that littered
a land that time forgot.
That’s why three full days before I helped Emily to the top
of the concrete and stone wall my family – Suzanne, me, Emily and Joe – stood
in the playground of another former orphanage, now a safe house for battered
wives and their children – and recalled a 1998 day in the countryside of
Slobozia, about 15 kilometers outside of Giurgiu, across the mighty Danube from
the high-rises and nuclear reactors of Bulgaria.
Back then, to enter
this facility -- a refuge for abandoned boys younger than 3 -- we’d had to step
through the gates and wade through a sea of smiling and scruffy kids. The boys clutched our legs and eagerly
reached for the chocolate cookies – “biscuits” they called them – we handed out
as we made our way through the playground to the office where we dressed Joe
for his “escape” from the too-full system. “Mister. Biscuits,” seemed to be the
only two words of English these boys knew.
I slipped packs of Merit 100s into the hands of the female caretakers,
all of whom were dressed in bathrobes.
A few days ago my son
Joe’s eyes glaze --shock and awe or weariness? – as we wander through the same playground
where the children of the abused mothers climb on the same swing set and slide
that had occupied some of Joe’s time up until that day 15 years ago.
Joe stares at the playground equipment as we re-enter the
old and somewhat shabby building. Instead of rows upon rows of cribs –
miniature barred prisons for Romania’s cast-off children – filling the rooms, separate
suites are shared by mothers and their children, refugees from spousal abuse.
The moms and the kids smile as we wander the hallways, one
of the caretakers talking to Joe in Romanian about what this building had been
and what it is now. Course Joe couldn’t
understand her. But he did understand the crucifix and icon-covered walls and
the new Eastern Orthodox chapel out front.
He also followed the woman as she took him across the
street, where a farmer had set up a tent that he filled with chickens:
Tuesday-night dinners awaiting the purchase and slaughter by area peasants
returning to their one-room, dirt-floored houses after a day in the sunflower
and hops fields or salt mines.
Suzanne and I both notice time had not erased the strong
smell of urine from inside the building.
For the two of us, this is our third trip to Romania. In a very real way the most important. Our children, now nearly full-grown, always
have known they were adopted from this country. And to them the words “orphans”
and “orphanage” were basically concepts.
Sure they came from orphanages, but what did that really mean?
And yes, they had been abandoned by their birth mothers and
stockpiled in the backward orphanage system run by the state, but where did
that occur?
We knew we couldn’t offer them the “why?” of their
abandonment. And since both of us came from basically middle-class American upbringings,
with the nuclear family and bickering siblings, we really couldn’t fully
understand what our children had gone through.
All we knew was that we loved them, that we had rushed to
Romania for Emily’s adoption as soon as we could after ABC reporter Tom
Jarriel, now long-retired, exposed the orphanages, hundreds of them, as he
traveled with the revolutionary forces during the fall of the communist regime at
Cold War’s end.
We knew that before
they left us for their own adult lives, we needed to return to Romania. Both of my babies have scars from their
orphan years that we are helping them heal even if we can’t fully comprehend
the cause. The trip was designed to help them know who they were, where they
had come from, perhaps give them a little closure and make them realize their
lives in Crieve Hall, USA, do matter.
Sure, we had told them about the King of the Gypsys and how
he and his brother had matching castle-like mansions on the road from Bucharest
to Giurgiu.
And we had told them about the Gypsys themselves, back then
kids who were mutilated by their own parents so they could be more successful
beggars. Now they are fat and middle-aged. But still maimed.
We had told them about Bucharest and its examples of extreme
wealth and poverty, a city designed by
evil dictator Nicolae Ceausescu to look like Paris. But it also resembles
hard-scrabble sections of Queens or Brooklyn or North Nashville.
The fact that the streets clogged with a million cars were
designed by the evil dictator to only accommodate 25,000 was the source of
frustration for our new friend, Lori Erbatu, who is on the board of a Christian
group home for orphans in Giurgiu. We
had hired Lori as our driver after he – on his own time – had followed up on my
e-mail clues to wander the countryside of Slobozia looking for the old facility
from which Joe had “escaped.”
“You will have a good
day,” he promised in our last e-mail before my family began the 27 hours of
flying it took us to get to Bucharest.
Lori offered my children a view of what is good about
Romania – the people – which I hope stays with them as they continue to digest
what it means to be a Balkan orphan.
The children had much to learn. The old state orphanage system has been
disbanded, replaced by private group homes.
The three boys in the group home in Giurgiu – where we dined with the
orphans after visiting Joe’s old “home” – were the same age as Joe. Like Joe,
they had no memories of the dirty little barracks in Slobozia. They were among the kids who grabbed our legs
and thanked us for the biscuits as we pushed through the playground, hoisting
our 3-year-old son 15 years ago.
Never adopted, these boys join us on the visit to their
former “home.” While none remembered the place itself, all remembered being
abandoned, tucked away in cribs, forgotten children. Blank, stunned stares.
The other three boys joked about their favorite beers and
Taylor Swift as we traveled to and from the orphanage. Joe remained quiet, lost in thought, staring
out the windows of the van at the one-room homes, some with straw roofs, others
ceramic. Looking for his biological mother?
Does he think too much or does he think he thinks too much?
I don’t know. All I know is that he kept looking around at the horses pulling
wagonloads of crops through the streets, and he was amazed by the flocks of
sheep that occasionally blocked our path.
Emily, who helped
Joe’s fellow orphanage alums set up FaceBook pages back at the group home, and
Suzanne both pointed out the massive water snake swimming near the Danube shore
when we stopped at Giurgiu’s tiny sea port.
“A lot of people take cruises from Germany to here,” Lori
explained, pointing at the passenger riverboat docked here. “They take the
cruise on the Danube and then we (his company) pick them up and take them to
Bucharest.”
There they visit the “People’s Palace” – built for Dictator
Ceausescu … but he never lived in this second-largest building in the world
(behind only the Pentagon) because the peasants and the students killed him. A gift to the country on Christmas day 1989.
The “old city” of
Bucharest changed dramatically since my first two visits.
The once-abandoned and ancient buildings are being
refurbished -- into hotels, restaurants, shops and the occasional sex shop – as
a way of providing jobs and keeping the young people in the country, ending the
flow of youth who left the University of Bucharest and sought work in Italy.
Churches hundreds of years old sit next to tea rooms and
bakeries up and down this central city hill and its cobblestone streets.
This too – the progress, the beauty of the young people, the
glories of the nation’s capital – was a very real part of our agenda in taking
the kids back.
We could not and will never know what it is like to be
abandoned by our mothers and brought up in relative squalor with hundreds of
other diaper-dragging tots and toddlers.
But we wanted our children to know the good that is in their homeland.
And there is the matter of physical size. Joe is 5-6 and likely will grow no taller.
Emily is about 5-0.
In the States they are short people, who – as Randy Newman
sang in his satirical rant -- stand so low, you got to pick them up just to say
hello.
Because of better nutrition in middle-class America, my
children come close to towering over their peers in the old country.
“I feel better seeing that everyone here is shorter than
me,” says Joe, who adds that if he moved back to Romania he could probably be
the center on the basketball team.
“I’m tired of people back home saying I look like I’m 12
years old,” says Emily, who, while hardly towering over the beautiful young
women of the city, at least holds her own.
Little things like that? Mission accomplished.
And maybe now that they have seen where they came from, the
other issues of orphans, feelings of abandonment and detachment, will be more
manageable. Maybe they can focus on who they are, where they are now and
perhaps how they can help their homeland in the future.
Emily’s old orphanage was our last stop in Romania. Flying from Bucharest to Timasoara
(birthplace of the revolution), we took a cab that traveled 91 mph (147 kmh) on
the narrow two-lane road to and from Arad.
Someplace in that city, a university town that is the
“capital” of western Romania, there may be a woman who slipped from the
birthing room and gave up this beautiful child of mine.
We didn’t look for her, of course. But what we did do was
stay in a hotel just a few blocks from the building that was the old
orphanage.
And as we walked the streets of Arad, my children may have
been stunned by some of what they saw on the sidewalks between monuments and
pastry shops.
A dozen-plus Gypsy beggars -- legs chopped, cropped, bent
backward, busted forward at the knee, arms or eyes missing -- didn’t slow me as
we wandered the streets of Arad. I’d been here before. Many years ago. And I
left with first prize.
These laughing, legless and bloated beggars seemed to
trouble my children. Joe, as I said, did not listen to my advice to walk away.
Instead he gave one woman some candy. She looked at it and threw it to the
sidewalk.
“That’s the last time I’m going to help someone,” says Joe,
almost in tears, as the woman strong-arms her way back to her huge Styrofoam
takeout lunch stashed near the open-air newsstand, grabs her iPhone from her
undies and begins a laughing conversation. Probably making fun of the kid who
gave her a piece of candy.
“It’s Romania, kid,” I say.
Sure, it’s a dark and tired place where Vlad D. Impaler is a hero and
the mutilated Gypsys provide a freak show.
But most of the people are beautiful, kind and warm…. Like my children.
“I always have this wall in my dreams,” Emily says, as she
rubs her hands against the concrete and stone that supports the ironwork. “I
think this is it.”
And then, as her dad helps her to the top of the wall to
where she can see the stairs in the courtyard, she remembers her first few
pulls up the steps to the 43-year-old guy with the long hair. The guy she
called Tata as he held her for the first time.
“This helps just to be here,” Emily says. Like many or most
orphaned children, there are ghosts, many that haunt them through life, causing
a mixture of fear of being tossed away with long-forgotten feelings of just
that happening.
“You always told me about being from an orphanage, but it’s
hard to understand that until you are standing right here. There’s closure,”
she says. Garlic and onions flavor the steam from a nearby iron pot being
readied for an afternoon party.
Emily reaches for the hand of the brown-haired guy who sat
on those steps 18 years ago. Course things have changed. Yes, “Sympathy for the Devil” still plays in
his head, but the hair is now white.
And that old man has a family he loves more than anything.
 |
| Outside Arad orphanage. |
