Where the Heart Is
Pavul saw Misa coming down the rolling dirt road that slipped between the soft hills edging the Dneister Valley. He caught the look on his older brother’s face as he approached the playing field, and he knew why he’d come. Misa stopped by the wooden bench, folded his arms, and stared at Pavul through the flock of kids kicking up dust at midfield, but Pavul pretended he hadn’t noticed. He continued to stand between the large, uneven posts at his end of the pitch, digging at a half-buried rock with his big toe. A flurry of bodies and excited shouts recaptured Pavul and he looked up, but too late.
“Watch it! What are you doing?” One of the older boys shouted as he raced towards him. Pavul stumbled forward, then watched as a short, wiry forward for the other team sent the volleyball sailing over his head, bouncing off the shorter of the two posts and falling with a thwop behind the goal. The wiry boy’s team whooped in celebration around him.
“Pavul,” Misa called from the sideline. He still had his arms crossed.
“Chiue?”
“Come on.”
Pavul collected his sandals from the side of the goalpost and walked towards the dirt road. The kids on Pavul’s team yelled, asking why he was leaving, while the other team simply jeered at him. Pavul said nothing. Misa unlocked his arms and strode in front. With his long gait, he was easily a dozen paces ahead of Pavul on the road before he got annoyed.
“Maybe I shouldn’t have gotten you, if you’re going to move like a cow.”
Pavul quickened his pace up to a half jog, his sandals swinging against his thigh in his hand. A short way ahead, a little boy and girl were selling wild berries in purple-stained paper cones along the roadside. Once they saw Pavul and Misa, they ran to meet them. The children held up their berry cones and tried to catch Pavul and Misa’s attention, but Misa avoided looking at them.
“Very good berries, very good. They’re fresh picked. Only one lei. Come on, boys. Only one lei,” the little girl said. She was missing both of her front teeth, so she spoke with a slight lisp.
“Get lost, pidaras.” Misa hissed. The girl backed away, and the boy put his arm over her shoulder.
Pavul looked from the girl to the boy. The girl wore a dress splotched with berry juice that sagged in the front. Despite the summer heat, the boy was dressed in long nylon pants and a dirty green sweater. They both looked at him expectantly.
“Don’t even think about it,” Misa commanded as he grabbed Pavul’s arm. Pavul didn’t resist, turning to fall behind his brother once again. He could feel the kids still standing behind him, their faces drawn and cones still in their hands, so he dug a folded piece of paper out of his pocket. The ten lei his Tante Maria had given him last Sunday. Pavul dropped the paper on the road as he jogged to keep up with Misa.
Once, a few summers before, after everyone in the house had gone to sleep, Pavul awoke to the sound of the front door creaking. He slid out his bedroom window and ran barefoot to the front of the house where Misa was lighting a cigarette.
“What are you doing up?” Misa said with a puff.
“Let me go with you,” Pavul whispered. Misa rolled up his sleeves and took another drag. He looked at Pavul for a moment before giving a half smile.
“Alright, Pavitsa. You can come this time.”
Pavul giggled as he and Misa passed by the hornbeam trees lining the fence and gate. They walked down the deserted street of their village, past dark houses, mostly with thatched roofs and the occasional tin shingling. The street ended in a path which led down to the sandy banks of the Dneister and followed the river to Tsensaren, a town five kilometers to the south.
“Do you know why they call the town ‘little mosquito?’” Misa asked between drags.
“No, why?” Pavul eagerly awaited the answer.
“Because a long time ago, a pig farmer from the town noticed that his swine started acting very funny every summer, running around in circles and squealing like they’d just been stuck. He couldn’t find anything wrong with the pigs—it was only in the summer that they did these strange things. So, being close to the river, he decided that it must be very tiny mosquitoes biting his pigs and driving them wild,” Misa said. He made a gduh gduh noise, which sounded like a stampede of pigs with tiny mosquitoes on their backs. Pavul laughed at the thought of pig-riding mosquitoes.
After a while, Pavul and Misa came across the farms which dotted the outskirts of Tsensaren. Misa helped Pavul over the fence of one of the farms and they crept toward the farmhouse, beyond the potato fields and rows of corn. Misa went directly to a large patch of berry bushes planted behind the house and started picking the tart fruits into the basket he had made with his shirt. Pavul did the same, intermittently popping tangy black berries and raspberries into his mouth. After he had filled his basket, Pavul joined his brother on the ground, eating berries off his stomach while he gazed up at the night sky. That was then.
The village came into sight and Pavul stopped to put his sandals back on. He and Misa walked up the main street, past neighbors going about their daily chores. Pavul could see them glancing over at him and his brother, some shaking their heads slowly, others lowering theirs. One babushka, who was swatting a rug with a broom over a clothes line, clucked her tongue and muttered a prayer as they walked by.
The front door of the house was propped ajar by a chunk of cinder block, and all of the windows were wide open. However, the air inside was thick and stiff, much like the air outside. Pavul weaved his way between his tanti, unchi and veri, bunica and bunicil. All of his relatives and many friends of the family were in the house, fanning themselves and talking quietly. The priest stood off to the side, wearing his long black robe and holding a wooden cross and his Euhologiu. Most of the women cried or prayed, or cried while they prayed.
“Where were you?” whispered Tante Maria as she bent down for a hug. Her face was red, her eyes swollen.
“Playing,” Misa snorted. Pavul looked down at his feet.
“Come, come,” Tante Maria said as she led Pavul and Misa into their mother’s bedroom. The room was sparse aside from the bed, a bedside table cluttered with rags and a bowl of water, a chair, a small chest of drawers, and worn rug on the floor. Their mother lay in a tight curl on the bed, coughing and facing away from the door toward the window. Her pillow was splattered with blood, as was the mattress near her head. Tante Maria placed a hand on the frail woman, then dabbed one of the cloths in the bowl of water and brought it to her sister’s forehead.
“Pavitsa?” Pavul’s mother beckoned him over. She could barely speak, and she labored over each short breath. Her eyes were like yellow marbles, glassy.
“I’m here, Mama.” Pavul came to face her, clasped her hand in his.
“My Pavitsa,” she rasped with a smile. “My good little boy.” Misa sat on the end of bed opposite Pavul, caressing her back over her blanket.
“I love you, Mama,” Pavul said as he squeezed her hand. He stayed with her and Misa, sitting there on her bed, until the shadows from the beech trees outside had crept into the room, casting their shimmering, leafy fingers on the walls.
Pavul did not go into his mother’s room a single time during the two days following her death. As required by Moldovan tradition, her body remained in the same place she had left it until the funeral. Bundles of wildflowers lay on the bed with her, and bowls of spiced fruit sat on every available surface in the room. The bedroom door stayed open the whole time, and Pavul avoided walking in front of it as often as he could. On one of the few occasions where he couldn’t avoid walking by, he saw Misa sitting in the chair next to the bed, holding one of the flowers and looking somewhere far, far away.
“What are you doing, Meesh?” Pavul asked from the doorway, barely above a whisper. His brother turned towards him slowly, wiped his nose and mouth with his hand, sniffed once, then turned back to face oblivion.
Pavul left Misa and moved into the kitchen where Tante Maria was slicing watermelon and cantaloupe. She had handled all of the cooking for the family over the past several weeks, and she made many of Misa and Pavul’s favorite dishes. She had also handled much of the household cleaning and chores, even asking Pavul and Misa to let her take on their normal chores. The result: over the past couple weeks, the house was as clean as it had ever been, and there was never a shortage of borscht or freshly cut fruit for whenever Pavul and Misa got hungry.
“Have some watermelon, Pavitsa,” Tante Maria offered. She handed Pavul a plate of watermelon chunks. He watched as the pink cubes slid along the plate on trails of their own juice. He thought back to the previous summer when a group of Baptist missionaries from the United States visited several nearby towns, including Tsensaren. They had helped to build a church for the small number of the Baptists living in the town, and also made repairs to the elementary school. Pavul and Misa had made several trips to Tsensaren during the two weeks the missionaries were there. He remembered how the Americans would try to engage the Moldovan children with their broken Romanian, how they smiled all the time, wore nice clothes, pointed at everything. They also loved taking pictures, and never seemed to miss an opportunity to get in a photo, especially with young kids.
“For Americans,” Misa informed Pavul during one of their first encounters with the missionaries, “even their attempts to help others are really just attempts to help themselves.” He said this after one of the missionaries, by way of a translator, had told a group of kids that spending time with them was an incredible, personal blessing to her.
“But they give us watermelon,” Pavul pointed out. The missionaries who worked on fixing the elementary school also handed out paper cups filled with chunks of juicy watermelon during their work breaks. The main reason Pavul went to Tsensaren during their stay was to get a cup of the sweet treats. Some days, they even gave the kids little packets of sugar for their watermelon. Pavul loved them for it.
Pavul put the plate of watermelon chunks down on the table and sat down. Tante Maria looked up from her work.
“There’s some sugar in the saucer there. Put some on your watermelon.”
“Multumesc,” Pavul said, but he didn’t touch the snack.
“Pavitsa,” Tante Maria said slowly, keeping her eyes on the food she was preparing, “how would you like to visit your Tante Loredana and Unchiul Nicolae in the United States for a while?”
“When? For how long?” Pavul said.
“In a few weeks I have to go back to Italy to work. After that I won’t be able to keep caring for you and Misa. Your Tante Loredana and Unchiul Nicolae are doing well in America. They have a nice house, and they even have a dog named Pirate. You’d like it there.”
“But how long?”
“Well,” Tante Maria looked up from the dough she was kneading and wiped her forehead with the back of her hand, “it would be for a while. Maybe for a few years.”
“A few years! No, I don’t want to go. Bunica and Bunic can take care of us.”
“Pavitsa,” Tante Maria started.
“No!”
“Pav—”
“I won’t go to America! America is an awful place with selfish people!”
“Pavul, listen to me. Bunica and Bunic love you and Misa very much, but they simply can’t take care of you.”
“Tante Natalia can. So can Tante Lydia and Unchiul Petru.”
“Pavitsa, draga, they can’t. Tante Loredana and Unchiul Nicolae can take good care of you and your brother in America. They can give you a life you can’t have here. Pavul, believe me when I say that the things you and Misa need, they’re not here in Moldova anymore. They’re in America.”
“Mama is here!” Pavul yelled before getting up from the table and bolting out the front door.
And Pavul ran. Out of the village. Along the riverbank. He ran as long as he could. He had to find a happy place. Any place. He came to outlying farms of Tsensaren, scrambled over the fence of the corn and potato farm, found the berry bushes and huddled beneath them.
After a few minutes, Pavul heard a noise that caused him to sit bolt upright. Someone was coming! Maybe it was the farmer, he thought, coming to beat him for stealing his crops. Pavul curled up and tried to squeeze as low as he could to the ground.
“Pavitsa?” It was Misa. He jogged over to the bushes, out of breath. Pavul uncurled himself and sat up, but he couldn’t look at Misa. Misa sat down next Pavul, and they both stared out at the rows of corn.
“Tante Maria wants us to go to America. She said we have to go.” Pavul said.
“I know,” Misa replied.
Pavul sat beneath the berry bushes, silent, watching the sun sink ever lower into the evening sky. Misa stayed with him, occasionally picking some berries off the bush and handing a few to Pavul. He and Misa took turns throwing the berries at a rock near the last row of corn until the light grew too dim to see. Finally, Misa stood up.
“Come on, Pavitsa. Let’s go home.” Misa said. He extended his hand to Pavul. Pavul was quiet for a moment, and then he looked up.
“Alright, Meesh,” Pavul said, taking his hand and allowing his brother to pull him up.
