Gudrun
I met Gudrun at a gathering of the Union of Communist Youth held in my high school. I was in my first year. All of us were members of the Communist Youth; only total failures weren’t. The Head Teacher presided, a tough woman with an elaborate beehive hairdo that was nine stories high. We called her the Sphinx. She silenced us with her eyes, then asked Comrade Savalas, the philosophy teacher, to proceed.
To us, he was a fool for being hopelessly in love with the teacher of Romanian literature. Rumor had it that he would soon be transferred to another school, outside Bucharest, because the teacher of Romanian literature was married, and falling in love with a married woman was a sin, of course.
“Now,” he said, “before we get down to the core of our meeting, which concerns the role of education in our dear country, let me tell you what the great Heraclitus said. He said that all things flow.”
It was unheard of, to begin a meeting of the Union of Communist Youth like that. We looked at the Sphinx and what her eyes were telling Comrade Savalas was no riddle: didn’t he know that some things didn’t flow, like our Socialist Republic?
He cleared his throat a few times and went on. “In fact, Heraclitus meant to say that all things float. On a river. Now, what is it that a thing floating on a river can’t do? It can’t go back. That means the river on which all things float is time. And all we can hope for is that we’ll get into the right current. Now, what is it that this current may be? Its nature loves to hide. Let me write its name for you.”
He picked up a piece of white chalk and went to the blackboard, which was dirty. He took the sponge and wiped off a small area, but the sponge was dry and it produced a cloud of chalk dust that made him cough like hell. When he recovered, he handed me the sponge.
“Run it under water for a bit and squeeze it out. Be sure to squeeze it
well. Go.”
I went to the toilet and soaked the sponge, but squeezed it only a tiny bit. I didn’t do it on purpose: I was distracted because I didn’t understand why he’d picked me of all the young Communists in the meeting. When I returned I handed him the sponge and he looked into my eyes and asked me, “What’s this current we should surrender to?”
I didn’t know what to say.
Comrade Savalas returned to the blackboard and began to clean it, then froze with his arm still raised. I froze too, my eyes fixed on the feeble rivulet that had sprung from the sponge in his hand. He’d pressed the sponge hard against the blackboard and all the water in it was now slowly leaking down his arm, making its way under his sleeve and permeating his old black suit. Someone burst out laughing.
“Who’s laughing?” shouted the Sphinx, her beehive swaying. After a long silence a girl stood up. Blue eyes, slight freckles, long blond hair carefully trimmed. She was trembling, and when I saw her I began trembling myself.
“How dare you? And you! He told you to squeeze it. You did it on purpose, didn’t you? Out! Give me your names and get out! The two of you!”
“So, what’s the only current we can surrender to?” I asked the girl when we were in the corridor. We both laughed.
Her name was Gudrun. It was an unusual name and she’d expected me to mock her, but I didn’t. Her parents were German, Swabian, and she went to the German high school; she’d been sent to our Youth meeting as a delegate. She, too, was in her first year.
“You like movies?” she asked me. “I live near a cinema. Some movies I see twice. This week it’s an Italian Western. With Giuliano Gemma. I saw it only once.”
After we’d seen a dozen movies together—mostly Romanian dramas about stubborn civil and zootechnical engineers—Gudrun invited me to her home. She said her parents were away, bidding farewell to a close friend. I found it bizarre, visiting someone in order to bid them farewell. Gudrun seemed sad when she told me this.
She showed me some photos she’d taken during the summer at a mountain resort. All of them featured a glittering lake under a low sky. We sat next to each other on the floor in her room. There was very little furniture. She dropped a photo, I picked it up, my hand touched hers, a noise came from the entrance hall and I saw on her face what that meant: her parents were back. The farewell business had taken less time than expected.
A week later Gudrun invited me to a party. I called my friend Adrian because I needed something to wear. We were about the same size even though he was two years old than me, but he was away so I went to Mum’s bedroom, opened her wardrobe, and rummaged among my father’s shirts he hadn’t taken with him when he left Mum. Now, what were the odds for a boy in Ceauşescu’s Romania finding an unopened bottle of Paco Rabanne aftershave just when he needed it? Let me tell you: zero. And yet, between my father’s shirts I found an unopened bottle of Paco Rabanne aftershave still in its original plastic packaging. It would have been a rarity even on the black market.
This is going to be my elixir, I thought, and then I did something irreversible: I deflowered the box. I put the plastic wrapping into my pocket, to be got rid of later, and opened the bottle. An ethereal scent sprang forth. It was sweet and woody and warm.
The party was in an apartment in an old block. All of us were ninth graders. Ana, a friend of Gudrun’s, was the host. Her parents had gone on vacation for a few days. She hadn’t told them about the party and there was nothing to eat. Polish Vodka and Romanian unfiltered cigarettes, that was all we got. One of the boys played a track from a rock album and bet that no girl could guess what band it was, but Gudrun did.
“It’s Nazareth,” she said, “and rock hurts, if you ask me.”
Because she won, she could play whatever music she wanted for the next hour—that had been the stake—and she said she’d like to play a record she’d brought with her: Cat Stevens, Tea for the Tillerman. Nobody had heard of Cat Stevens.
“It’s great for slow dancing,” she said.
I rushed to the bathroom and splashed a great deal of elixir all over myself. Of course I’d brought the bottle with me. I inhaled as deeply as I could, put the bottle back in the pocket of my jacket, returned to the living room, and invited Gudrun for a dance.
She was right: that record was great for slow dancing. By the end of the A-side, we were a globe rotating on its axis. On the B-side, we were pressed to each other and sweating. Finally, we fell through a door into a dark room, where an armchair blocked our incomprehensible trajectory.
I didn’t want Gudrun to feel my bottle, so I gently dropped it on the armchair. She opened her small messenger bag, which she’d had over her shoulder, and took something out. We heard a sound like glass breaking and a stingy odor spread throughout the room. The celestial Paco Rabanne fragrance, emanating from me, and a strong vinegar scent, coming from the armchair, began fighting each other. The vinegar won. I felt I couldn’t breathe. I slipped out of Gudrun’s arms and switched on the single lightbulb. On the armchair I saw the Paco Rabanne bottle, intact, and next to it a small transparent bottle, broken.
We looked at each other.
“Is this a joke?” I asked.
She was pale.
All our mums used vinegar to clean rugs. What did she take me for? A dirty boy? I was angry. I put the Paco Rabanne back in the pocket of my jacket and, as I did so, I saw a bottle of Havana Club Banana Liqueur on a shelf. Someone must have hidden it there. We boys used to do that at parties—hide bottles of booze, just in case. I took it down and put it to my mouth and drank. Four good gulps of banana liqueur on an empty stomach. It was unbearably sweet and a burning sensation coated my throat.
Gudrun was beneath the lightbulb, looking at me, and all I wanted in this world was to kiss her. I took her in my arms, my face touched hers, and then I felt the liqueur moving backward, from my stomach to my mouth.
What else I could I do? I ran out of the room, threw up in the toilet, then ran from the apartment. All the way home I threw up. When I got to my room, I realized I’d used almost a third of the Paco Rabanne aftershave. I took off the cap, filled the bottle with tap water, put it in the box, and slid it between my father’s shirts, back where I’d found it. I’m sure Mum smelled the aftershave on my clothes when she did my laundry, but she didn’t say anything.
I wanted to call Gudrun, but I was ashamed. After two weeks, Ana told me that Gudrun and her family had emigrated to West Berlin. They’d left Romania for good a few days after the party.
“Did she leave you any address?”
“Why should she? She’ll never come back and I’ll never go to Germany. Nor will you. Only Swabians may go to Germany. It’s like she’s died. She hasn’t left me anything, and I’m sure they couldn’t take all their stuff with them. But she’s left something for you. I’ll give it to you tomorrow.”
It was the Cat Stevens album.
I had no one to turn to but Adrian.
“You fool!” he said after I finished my story. “Didn’t you know about the vinegar trick?”
I did not.
“If it’s not during the safe period, then one thing a girl can do—besides pray—is to rinse with vinegar afterward.”
“What for?”
“Vinegar kills spermatozoids, man. I thought I told you that. God, have you ever wondered why no contraceptives are available in our Socialist Republic? Because they’re illegal, that’s why. Like abortion. They’re illegal because Ceauşescu and the Party have decided to have more of us. More morons. Let me tell you this, only one girl in ten million would do that before leaving this sad country for good. You hear me? One in ten million. And what did you do? Drink half a bottle of banana liqueur on an empty stomach.”
Every evening I’d sneak into Mum’s bedroom, open her wardrobe, and smuggle the Paco Rabanne aftershave into my room. I’d wait until I was sure she was asleep, and then play the Cat Stevens record. I had an old valve radio with one speaker and a turntable on top. A heavy cumbersome thing with a dial full of names of Eastern European cities. Above the abstract geography, flanked by two white knobs, was an eye tube. The aftershave was now one-third water, but its scent was still strong. I would inhale it deeply and slowly, then hold my breath and hover over Sofia, Sarajevo, Beograd, Zagreb, Budapest, Bratislava, and Praha, on my way to a beige desert, West Germany, in the middle of which lay an oasis, West Berlin, my ultimate destination.
In November, Mum and I visited one of her sisters in her village. When we returned to Bucharest, a neighbor told us the Berlin Wall had fallen. That night, I opened the Paco Rabanne in such a frenzy I spilled almost half of it on my pillow. When I replenished the bottle with tap water my precious elixir finally surrendered to the chlorine. Then the bottle disappeared. I inspected the entire wardrobe, then the entire apartment, sniffing like a dog, but I couldn’t pick up any trace of it. Mum didn’t say anything, and I didn’t have the nerve to ask her about it.
I never saw Gudrun again.
The author’s radio from “Gudrun.”