A Reunion Far From the Terror

The man in the black suit and wide-brimmed hat now walking hesitantly up the ramp from customs looks Romanian. Is he my father? My heart pounding, I press through the throng of well-wishers gathered to greet arrivals from the Pan Am flight.

‘ ‘Bine ai venit!’ I hear a voice behind me and another woman runs up and kisses the man on both cheeks. My mistake terrifies me. What if I don’t recognize him? Twenty-five years ago when I said goodby to him, I was not yet 12 years old, a frightened little girl on her way to an unknown land. Even then, I had had only eight months to get reacquainted with him, for he had been arrested when I was 5 and kept in prison for six years.

Suddenly I spot him. There’s no doubt in my mind, it’s him! The round, warm, familiar face, the kind, luminous blue eyes now sparkling with tears; my blue eyes, my children’s blue eyes. I embrace him and try not to cry.

‘Bine ai venit!’

‘Bine te-am gasit!’-- traditional Romanian greetings: “Hope you’ve come in good health.” “Hope I’ve found you in good health.” His voice rings familiar. It strikes chords that vibrate deep, and leave behind the bewildered 11-year-old girl, shrinking fearfully from the emaciated man with missing teeth. His voice awakens younger memories, of stories, songs, lullabies, of a little girl fighting with her big brother for a larger share of their father’s chest where they rest their heads as he croons: ‘Somnoroase Pasarele!’ “My sleepy little birds!” I relax. This time I know I will give him the greeting he deserves.

Twenty-six years ago, in Romania, when my father, Ion Eremia, came out of prison, I could not give him a proper welcome. I had become accustomed to living without him. I had learned not to think about him, not to ask questions. I was too young to understand when he disappeared. My mother told me he had gone to Russia on official business. I believed her.

Still, I didn’t understand why we had to move from our large, beautiful house into a tiny attic; why my mother could no longer appear as a stage actress but had to work as a file clerk; why my best friend Marica told me one morning that she was not allowed to play with me any more. At 11 I was a promising swimmer, trained to someday represent my country in the Olympics. I wore the red kerchief of the Pioneer around my neck. I was not prepared to hear that my father was sentenced to 25 years in prison in solitary confinement for writing a book called “Gulliver in the Land of Lies.”

One Sunday afternoon my mother got a phone call. Normally calm and composed, she suddenly became very agitated.

“Your father’s back!” she told my brother and me, her voice shaking. “He’s at his mother’s house.”

“From Russia?” I asked.

“From prison, you fool!” said my brother.

Two and a half years older than me, he had been told the truth and had to bear his secret burden, alone. For the first time, my mother revealed to me our history.

When my father fell in love with my mother, a young actress whom he first saw on stage, he was a general, a rising star in the new regime. A career officer who had joined the anti-Nazi underground movement during World War II, one of the few well-educated members of the Communist Party, he became vice secretary of defense in 1952, along with Nicolae Ceausescu. However, he quickly awakened to the injustices of his government: fear, hunger, lies, false arrests, labor camps.

Fired from his job in 1955 for publicly stating his outrage, he wrote a satirical political allegory, “Gulliver in the Land of Lies,” which he tried to smuggle out of the country. Caught, he was condemned in 1959 at a secret trial to 25 years in solitary confinement. My mother might have gone to prison, too, had my parents not gotten divorced only weeks before my father’s arrest, in anticipation of this possibility. Then, in 1964, all political prisoners were granted amnesty, an overture by Romania towards the West.

I didn’t see my father until two days later, and then quite by accident. My mother, shocked by his emaciated appearance and worried we’d be frightened, decided that we should give him a chance to recuperate. But fate willed otherwise. Instead of walking home after school as usual, my girlfriend and I decided to visit the “Lupoica,” the quaint little park built around an ancient statue of Romulus and Remus suckling the she-wolf. Facing the statue was a bench, and there my friend and I sat next to a thin, bald man with missing teeth who looked at me piercingly and asked my name. I grabbed my girlfriend’s hand and ran away. I wouldn’t tell her why.

An hour later, my father knocked at the door. I could see him through the keyhole. I was alone in the house. Still, I let him in. “I couldn’t wait another minute!” he cried. His deep-set blue eyes were watering and his head had been shaved. Frightened, I turned away from his outstretched arms.

The first time I allowed my father to hug me was eight months later, at the airport, when we said farewell for what we thought might be forever. Though he knew that he would never be allowed to leave, he pushed us to take advantage of the expanded emigration quotas and apply to join the rest of my mother’s family in California. Selflessly, he signed a paper that gave my mother permission to take his children away. As our plane began to board, I finally consented to kiss him goodby.

“A beautiful dream!” my father exclaims as we enter Sea World. We’re in San Diego for the Memorial Day weekend. For the past month we’ve been taking my father everywhere and he’s been delighting in everything. Shamu’s acrobatics, the little packages of sugar, cream, mustard and ketchup available to everyone at the food stands, the simulated earthquake on the Universal Studios tour, the endless, full shelves at Von’s market, the opulent mansions of Beverly Hills, the magical efficiency of the McDonald’s drive through--all equally amaze him.

“No one back home would believe this,” he keeps murmuring, recounting the long food lines in freezing weather for small, rotten potatoes, soup bones and pork fat, the only food available in Romania for the past few years. “Americans are happy people,” he tells my husband, as the audience laughs and cheers at the “Sea Lion and the Otter Show.” As tireless as my children, my father doesn’t want to miss anything. He’s in excellent physical shape.

He tells us that he swims regularly, and goes mountain climbing. His proud, military bearing and powerful, athletic build make him look taller than his 5-foot-7 height and younger than his 76 years. His eyes sparkle in childish merriment as he feeds the dolphins, chases my children, eats hamburgers and French fries. But as he enters our joyous world, I enter the dark world of his past. While he laughs, I cry.

At the Bahia Hotel beach, my father helps my son build a tall tower out of sand. I lie on a chaise lounge and read “The Subterranean Tower,” a book he wrote in his mind while in prison and only recently set to paper. I see my father, alone in his dark cell, counting the footsteps of the guard who comes to peer at him every five minutes. Then he climbs on top of his iron bed and strains to catch a glimpse, through the bars of his tiny window, of the tops of several poplar trees.

My father is not allowed to talk to anyone or do anything. During his solitary 15-minute walks in the prison courtyard he must keep his eyes on the ground and under no circumstances look up.

“I thirst for the sky,” he cries in one of his poems:

From my dark cave

From my deep grave

Under bolts of ice

Under waves of fog

I miss endlessly

That blue infinity

How I thirst ... thirst for the sky.

The last line vibrates through my mind the next day as we take a harbor cruise, pose for pictures with my husband and children. That afternoon, while my father and children splash in the pool, I lie on another chaise lounge reading the chapter, “The Coughed Prayer”:

“It was the third day of Christmas, St. Stefan’s day, my (father’s) name-day. Lost in my happy memories, I didn’t notice at first the loud coughs in the cell next door. It was my neighbor, the Catholic priest, the only prisoner among us allowed the right to cough out loud--he suffered from tuberculosis. I realized that his coughs followed the Morse Code signals we used to communicate with each other through knocks on the wall. I deciphered a short cough, a period, followed by a double cough, a line. The priest was using his special privilege to convey a prayer to St. Stefan, on behalf of the prison’s slaves. He repeated his prayer twice, and I finally understood it:

“St. Stefan, you, the first martyr of Christianity, listen to our fervent prayer, destroy our chains, and deliver us from our torturers. Amen.’ ”

A wet little hand touches my cheek and startles me.

“Why are you crying Mommy?” asks my 3-year-old daughter.

“The sun’s in my eye, darling.” I wrap her up in a towel, hold her shivering little body next to mine, and wonder: Was it worth it? My father was robbed of our childhood. Would I risk losing my children to live up to my ideals? Would my commitment to truth and justice transcend my love for my family?

On our way to the Wild Animal Park, my father, sandwiched between my children, radiates happiness. “I’m a very lucky man,” he suddenly says. “I was born on a lucky day.” My husband looks at him, amazed. But I understand. Even in prison, my father managed to find happiness. It was there, as I learned from his book, that he found himself as a writer: “For the first time in my life, I was free to write, even if only in my thoughts. Here, I had no social, professional, or personal obligations. Miraculously, I was able to transform solitude into intense creative activity, torture into ecstasy, the desert into a rich internal world, hell into heaven.”

In the last 10 years my father has managed to publish four books of historical fiction, the germs of which were planted in prison, and get them past the censors despite the hidden allusions to Ceausescu’s tyrannical regime.

As we near the Wild Animal Park, it begins to rain. We find ourselves in the middle of a storm and have no choice but to turn back. “Oh, no!” my children cry. I’m disappointed for them and for my father, too. He was so eager to see a place where animals were not kept in cages.

“Don’t cry!” he tells my children. “Is good! California has drought. Your earth is thirsty!”

I turn around in my seat and give him a big hug. I’m proud he’s my father. I’m happy I’m his daughter.