Keeping the Feast (7 page)

 

 

 

 

B
y the autumn of 1989, two years after we had arrived in Warsaw, the lush basil plant that John had carried with us from Rome looked like a couch-ridden invalid. Perched on the broad, south-facing windowsills of our living room, it tried to make the most of the heat from the triple radiators below, but two years of Warsaw’s weak northern light and bitter winters had leached its leaves of their heady flavor and vibrant color. Still, the plant hung on against all odds, and we became grudgingly accustomed to its paler northern taste. Italy’s pungent flavors were already becoming memories.

The memories that would replace them were nowhere near as pleasant once the Soviet bloc began to come unglued. Mikhail Gorbachev’s program of glasnost, or openness, had unlocked doors throughout the Eastern bloc and the Poles were the first to bolt. The East Germans were next, and once the Berlin Wall was breached on November 9, 1989, the rest of the dominoes of Eastern Europe began falling West, too. Czechoslovakia started to topple eight days after the fall of the wall, with a march by university students determined to force out their Communist leaders as the Poles and East Germans before them. Though it began with police violence, the media dubbed it the Velvet Revolution.

It was at this protest that I was beaten, Czechoslovak riot police dragging me and a colleague who had come to my aid, Tyler Marshall of the
Los Angeles Times
, into a dingy building entryway. I don’t know how long it went on, though it seemed long. Much of it seemed like a film, being played in slow motion for an audience of one. My head was bleeding the way heads always bleed, copiously, from two large openings where I had been initially clubbed unconscious. Tyler’s brand-new Burberry trench coat seemed to have served as a sponge for much of it. My own coat, which looked like a down sleeping bag with sleeves, and which had protected me from many of the body blows, was bloodied as well. My blouse, sweater, and skirt were wet, too, as blood seeped down my neck and dripped south. At some point the cops who were beating us withdrew, and new cops, without riot sticks, appeared and waited until an ambulance arrived. We were put inside with another casualty, a hysterical teenage girl caught up in the violence by chance. Left at a nearby hospital, I was treated by a doctor who shaved narrow portions of my head to clean my two wounds, spritzed them with an anesthetic, sewed me up with what looked and felt like transparent fishing line, then wrapped my filthy head in white gauze.

The doctor filled out a form attesting to the treatment and handed it to me. Well after midnight, long after my deadline, I was allowed to leave the hospital with Iva Drapalova, the retired Associated Press bureau chief, whom Tyler had called to alert. Her coming was an unsought kindness I can never repay. Iva tried to talk me into going home with her rather than returning to my hotel, but I wanted to contact the
Tribune
foreign desk and John, who was in Warsaw, to let them know what had happened. Iva dropped me off at the Alcron, the faded Art Deco hotel where I always stayed in Prague. The desk clerk gasped when she saw me, my head completely swathed in white bandages, my ankle-length down coat still soaked with blood. She let me send my telex to my editors, then with uncharacteristic speed got me a phone line to Warsaw. I didn’t want John to hear from news reports or colleagues that I’d been beaten.

When John came on the line, I felt comforted, as I always did, just by the sound of his voice. But when I told him what had happened, his reaction only unnerved me once more. “ It’s all my fault,” he said again and again. I tried to argue that it had had nothing to do with him, but no matter what I said, I could not bring him around. “ I brought you here,” he kept repeating, his voice full of sorrow. “ It’s all my fault.” Still in shock from the night’s events, I hung up the phone thinking that our brief conversation felt like yet another
thwack
of a riot stick.

Slowly climbing the stairs to my room, I realized that John’s unexpected response to the beating upset me nearly as much as the beating itself. And it suddenly hit me that no matter how similar our backgrounds had been, our psychological makeups were very different. In times of severe stress, John felt guilty, unlike me, who always got angry. I was angry at the cops who beat me, angry at the Communist apparatus still vainly trying to cling to power. I was angry at myself, for not having gotten out of the situation earlier, in time to file my story; angry that I had missed a deadline for the first time in my career; angry at John for not understanding that his feeling of responsibility for my beating made no psychological sense at all to me. And then, with pitch-perfect bad timing, I realized that our wedding was less than two weeks away. For the first time since we had met four years earlier, I felt a sudden twinge of fear about our future. My anger, his guilt: neither emotion was exactly an ideal thing to bring to our wedding, nor was the idea that our dynamic as a couple seemed subtly changed.

I stayed in Prague another two days, long enough to tell a colleague on the
Tribune
’s foreign desk all that had happened, a rambling conversation that the paper published as a story, and then I flew home to Warsaw. John, who was never good around blood, met me at the airport, looking increasingly green as he took in my bandaged head and my ankle-length parka, both still covered in dried blood. He put his arms around me and held on tight, then took my hand and drove me home. We turned in very early that night, for now it was John’s turn to leave for Prague. After he left early the next morning, the headaches began: deep, pounding pains that did not go away for weeks. My face swelled in the coming days, until it was no longer recognizable even to me. My entire face, especially around the eyes, was grotesquely bloated, black and blue. As the days passed, the swelling seemed to shift south, from forehead to under the eyes, to nose, to cheeks. The bruises faded first to purple, then to green, and finally to yellow.

My bruises had already turned to green about a week later, when John and I flew to Rome to clear the final bureaucratic hurdles before our wedding. I told myself that the dynamic between John and me had not essentially changed but only that I understood it better. By the time the flight landed in Rome, both of us had managed to put the beating aside for the time being and we were once again excited at the thought that the wedding we had long been planning was finally about to happen. By the time we took our vows in Rome’s ornate wedding hall atop the Capitoline Hill, my bruises had faded to yellow.

Our wedding, perhaps like many second marriages, ended up feeling like a somewhat thrown-together affair, squeezed into a lull in the revolutions spreading throughout Eastern Europe. For the ceremony, I had packed an old dress I loved, but a longtime UPI friend, Cathy Booth, then working for
Time
magazine, insisted I buy something new. Two nights before the ceremony she dragged me through an endless series of shops not far from the Spanish Steps until I found a suit she deemed festive enough for the occasion. She also insisted I carry a bouquet, and silenced my objections by saying she would arrange it all. When the florist failed to appear at her apartment before she left for the ceremony, she threw together a bridal bouquet from flowers she happened to have in a vase in her living room. All the initial photos of the wedding show me carrying Cathy’s simple, homemade bouquet. The florist, in typical Roman style, arrived at city hall just as we were called in for the ceremony. His bouquet, stiff and formal, had none of the charm of Cathy’s posies, but for a bride who hadn’t wanted to carry a bouquet at all, I ended up with two.

John and I had booked a big table at the same restaurant where we had celebrated our departure from Rome two years earlier. Just ordering off the menu, we had a long, delicious meal, full of chatter, good wishes, congratulatory telegrams, and endless happy photos, none of them posed. Only after we finished the main course did I realize that we had completely forgotten to arrange for a wedding cake. I could handle my last-minute purchase of a suit, the mix-up with the flowers, even the chaos of twenty friends trying to order a wedding feast off a menu. But completely forgetting to arrange a wedding cake sent a shiver of misgiving through me. Forgetting the cake seemed unforgivable.

Normally I dismissed Roman
scaramanzia
—all the touching of wood and other gestures that Romans routinely practice to ward off evil—but I found myself touching wood under the tablecloth anyway. The missing cake made me feel that we had somehow failed to keep our wedding feast. Even second marriages deserve a better start than that.

Before the ceremony, I had bought a tube of pancake makeup and covered my face with foundation to erase the traces of my fading bruises. I gamely parted my hair on the wrong side, to hide the scars and bits of surgical thread that were still working their way out of my scalp. Everybody told me I looked fine, and the photos my brother took of John and me show no evidence of the beating, just a radiant bride. We all had a laugh over one of the
Tribune
’s wedding presents: a blue plastic batting helmet from the Chicago Cubs, to keep my head safe for my next revolution. I didn’t realize it then, but the
Tribune
’s other present, a small silver clock, was already ticking off the time till the next round.

Given the speed with which the Soviet bloc was falling apart, neither John nor I had wanted to ask our editors for extra time to take a honeymoon, so we flew directly from Rome back to Prague, where Communist leaders were still hanging on to power by a thread. The Czechoslovak secret police lifted our wedding snapshots from our hotel room to let us know they were watching, and we never saw those photos again. By the time the protesters finally managed to push the Communists out—and many of our dissident, jailbird Czechoslovak friends assumed the reins of power—it was nearly Christmas.

We had always intended to take a real honeymoon once the Christmas holidays were over, once our work life calmed down, once Eastern Europe’s revolutions had all played out. It was only years later, the trip never taken, that I realized we hadn’t missed our honeymoon, but that we had taken it before the ceremony. The two years we had gotten to know each other in Italy as well as the two years we had spent in Poland before our wedding were full of magic and promise, the time when we got to enjoy our very new lives as a couple, even if we were more often physically apart than together. It was the solid bedrock of the joy of those years that saved us both once the troubles began.

T
he Christmases of my childhood were always two-day feasts: the meatless
vigilia
of Christmas Eve, and the ravioli and roast beef of Christmas Day. One thing was clear: they centered more on the table than under the tree.

On Christmas Eve we kept the traditional Christmas fast in the sense that we ate no meat. But in terms of quantities, it was the Christmas feast we kept. We ate Uncle Joe’s cherrystone clams, run quickly under the broiler with garlic, parsley, and a few drops of good olive oil. We ate bowls of spaghettini with clams, cooked briefly with garlic, clam broth, white wine, olive oil, and scads of fresh, flat-leaf parsley and freshly ground black pepper. Sometimes we ate scampi, large shrimp broiled in olive oil, butter, garlic, parsley, and lemon juice until they were just barely beginning to turn pink. The grown-ups would feast on my grandmother Jennie’s smoked eel and on her
baccalà
, salt cod, both of which my cousin Paul, brother Danny, and I pretended not to see and tried not to smell. Jennie would produce platters of eggplant and roasted sweet red peppers, bathed in olive oil and garlic slivers.

A huge green salad signaled dessert was on its way: a mountain of Jennie’s Neapolitan
struffoli
, cherry-sized balls of sweet, eggy dough, fried till golden, drenched in honey, then covered in walnuts and multicolored sprinkles. As a child I loved prying those sticky, honey-covered fritters apart almost as much as I loved the taste of them, but I always saved the walnut halves for last, all gooey with honey and bristling with sprinkles. To finish off the meal, we opened tiny boxes of lemon- or orange-flavored
torrone
, stark white nougat stuffed with almonds, bought at the Italian grocery at Main and Capitol.

By two p.m. on Christmas Day, we were always back at the table, somehow ravenous again despite what we had consumed the night before. On Christmas we always ate ravioli, large, round pillows of tender, homemade pasta filled with ricotta, Parmigiano, parsley, and eggs. Tiny Nana Gabriel was my cousin Paul’s paternal grandmother and no blood relation to us, but my brother and I considered her our third grandmother, not only on the strength of her hand-rolled ravioli and homemade sausages but also on the strength of her patter—a nonstop monologue of jokes, stories, and impersonations of her customers at Gabriel’s Meat Market. Nana Gabe would hover near the two huge pasta pots, murmuring incantations against the possibility that her creations might open and spill their cheesy contents into the bubbling water.

We called them “ravees” and ate them drenched in a tomato
ragù
enriched with every kind of meat imaginable, from meatballs and sausages that Nana Gabe had made herself, to a bit of chicken, some meaty pork ribs, and braciole, thin scallops of tough beef rolled around an herbal stuffing that stewed in the sauce till tender. After we had downed the ravees and the gravy meat, the roast beef would appear, dark and crusty on the outside but bloody rare inside, just the way we all liked it.

After salad, desserts began appearing: roast chestnuts, with rough crosses carved into their tough hides to keep them from exploding on the fire; almonds and walnuts; dried figs and dates; Jennie’s famous Swedish butter cookies, the recipe learned decades earlier from a Swedish neighbor; more of Jennie’s
struffoli;
more boxes of
torrone
; and finally, for my cousin, brother, and me, candy canes and popcorn balls, the only proof that we were American, and not feasting in a dining room located somewhere in Italy.