I was
born in a world of chaos, very different from the one I live in today. So different,
in fact, that it’s almost inconceivable for two such places to share the same atmosphere.
As such, after a great deal of introspection in my formative years, I find
myself fractured in two separate entities which are constantly vying for
control inside my mind. One half was nurtured in an environment of freedom, opportunity,
plied and molded with the arrogance and blind naivety of prosperity. This half
is hopeful, a believer, and she still trusts that in this world dreams can come
true. The other half was hammered and twisted into shape by the chaos.
The setting
of a story is comprised of two parts: place and time. The place will take this
entire novel to illustrate and even then you may not fully comprehend it. I
lived it and I still don’t. The time?
I came
into this world a silent, gaunt figure, on January fifteenth, nineteen
eighty-five, four years before the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of
Communism. I was not a gurgling, squalling
baby, with pudgy cheeks and bright eyes locked on the future. Though I was born
on time, I only weighed five and a half pounds and had a sallow, yellow tint to
my skin. I was not the first baby born underweight and with dark circles that
year, nor would I be the last. After my first few breaths, I was rushed from
the birthing room before my mother had a chance to see me, and I joined the
other incubated children who had little hope.
Many
women in that place would suffer the same fear as my mother, unable to hold or
even see their newborns because of our medical conditions. And of course the
greater fear of how to feed their children if they did survive. Most likely,
nine months before, when my parents shared the news of their pregnancy, the most
popular statement had been a heartfelt: “Oh I’m sorry. Did you want it?” There
was little joy in bringing a new life into such a place.
The
place was Bucharest, Romania, the capitol of a third world country, the last
hold out against the force of Soviet influence we have come to know as the Iron
Curtain. Communism still reigned supreme, and the cult of personality was a way
of life for us. The situation outside my little birthing room was an uncertain
and dangerous thing, ripe for violence. It would take four more years for the cauldron
to boil and burst, and when it did, the fate of a nation was altered and my
life would never be the same.
Yet, I
knew none of this as my tiny body was prodded with needles and tubes, and
neither did the thin, blond woman who awaited my return. She had been a gymnast
in her younger days, lithe, tall and graceful even years later. The chaos had
stolen a spark from her wild eyes and robbed the thrill of hope from her heart,
though her beauty could never be completely erased. The nurses would have
described her as giving, mostly because she had money to bribe them with, and
more than a little scary. Sometimes, she resembled a feral animal, pacing the
shared room like a caged beast. There was a constant restlessness about her, as
though some inner fire would not give her peace. She was a doer, in a world standing still.
If I
could comprehend such things, I would have missed my mother in that first
month. She and my father had paid a good deal of under the table money to keep
her in the hospital that long. It was a bitter, record-breaking winter, and
most days there was no heat or water in the city. Children and elderly died by
the dozens, victims of the cruel cold and substandard conditions. They were
expendable, only the workforce mattered.
This is
only a small glimpse into the chaos. The horrors that I will enumerate here
will sometimes seem ludicrous to you, impossible that anyone could accept them,
much less live them for twenty-five years. Yet this is not a story about those
horrors, of defeat, a story about the side of me ruled by chaos. This is a
story about survival, about thriving and rising above the odds. This is a story
about how that other half was born. A story about a hero.
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