Crows and Two Thoughts

Three days until departure: what to take, what to leave behind (literally, metaphorically).

Today is Sunday. I returned from Bucharest last night, had a strange dream in which an actor who plays a shrink chided me, and woke up at 7:30 a.m., ready to get ready to come home. Instant coffee. Harmony (my coffee shop) is closed on Sunday; apparently, its owners are a small, evangelical church and they conduct services today as well as observing a day of rest. I can’t fault them. Roughly three times a week, they bring me the small oval tray comprising my Americano and a small water when I sit down. I am “Norm.” (Watch “Cheers.”) I am a regular.

To-do list: pack the suitcase that will hopefully be shipped home. Find out that it won’t be shipped home; an exorbitant fee. I will drag it to Krakow and London, where I am going with my son, for three days each. Put the other items in packing cubes. I love packing cubes. To my friends who gave me packing cubes before I left: gratitude. Make myself scrambled eggs with sauteed onions and tomatoes. Take out the trash. Photograph the cat who lives by the building where the “bins” are. I am being polite by not calling them dumpsters. Write goodbye/thank-you notes. Review my students’ attendance and grades according to their weekly assignments and midterm. Write Cheri Mae’s recommendation to graduate school. (She deserves it.) Do laundry. Drape laundry on drying rack. Gather stuff (knives, wine, pasta, hand-warmers, Thera-Flu, towels, honey, and more) that will stay here for Faith and Jess, who will come over later. Videotape the crows’ raucous gatherings; now that the trees are stripped of leaves, I see the numerous nests, like blotches shared by several branches. The crows are exposed and I don’t think they’re happy about it. They sound accusatory. I think of that song I love by a band called Cake, “Short Skirt/Long Jacket.” The lyrics describes the singer’s ideal girl, who is “touring the facility and picking up slack.” I think of my crows as taking names, as plotting a coup. I know they know my face; it’s only a matter of time. California poet Robinson Jeffers often wrote about hawks and vultures, which, at moments, he seemed to like more than humankind. Perhaps Iasi would have suited him.

I think about what I have experienced that I have not described; of course, the untold is a majority of my experience here. This substack is just a highlight reel. I have poems and notes for poems, quotes from others’ poems, words and phrases jotted down in my Romanian class, museum visits unrecorded, countless photographs of images – buildings, trains, unaware people, wary cats – I want to study, to discuss, to funnel into language. My friends and I acknowledge that we are at the point of being able to “hold two thoughts” at once about Romania; we can love the plane ride from Bucharest to Iasi being less than an hour but complain about how one almost always must take a tram from the airline gate to the actual plane. We can love being encouraged to linger at a restaurant but also want to pay the check more quickly; while at “Care Cu Bere,” a famous restaurant in Bucharest, the maître d’ told us we could “only” have the table for two hours. We refrained from commenting: we only want it for one. By the way, we know that this eating establishment is known as a tourist trap but we loved it. The food was wonderful, the waiter did not seem annoyed in the slightest by us – in fact, he seemed sort of amused. I told him my mamaliga was delicious and he smiled and said, “I know.”

Tomorrow I have a coffee with Iulia, a professor/friend who taught the discussion section of my Modern American Poetry class, and I need to close up my bank account, phone number and Internet. Maybe I’ll do the Internet on Tuesday; once it’s down, it’s down. I’m having dinner with Faith and Jess and Lorelei and Florina on Monday night. I’m hoping to check in with Stefana and Dana before I go, and my landlord will come by to wrap things up. He’s been lovely. Before we moved into our house in East Side Costa Mesa, I had lived in many apartments. I’m not sure I thought I would again, but here I am. Here I have been.

***

I guess I do want to mention (note hesitancy) my visit to the Pogrom Museum in Iasi of a few days ago, just before I went on my west coast odyssey to Timisoara and Brasov. As usual, my navigation took me half a block away. I walked up and down the block. I wasn’t giving up so easily. I found an unassuming door behind a parking lot gate and entered. A young woman walked me through the exhibit, which had been assembled and produced by the Elie Weisel Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania. I’m going go with some quotes from their literature, because I don’t think my paraphrasing will do the subject justice. I hope you’ll bear with me:

“The Iași Pogrom was an operation devised at the top of the Antonescu administration and put into practice by Romanian and German army units, with the participation of some of the civilians in the city. The anti-Semitic psychosis, deliberately fueled by the civilian and military secret services, contributed decisively to the preparation of the Pogrom of June 29, 1941. The digging of mass graves in the Jewish cemetery in Păcurari, before the violent anti-Semitic outbreak, proves the planned nature of the assassination. . . . The Prefecture, the Police Headquarters, echelons of the Romanian army and gendarmerie, the railway company regional office in Iași have contributed to the killing in cold blood of over 13,000 out of the total of 35,000 Jews living in Iași in those years.

The Police Headquarters yard and the two death trains were the main places of extermination for the Jews of Iași. Of the 4,400 Jews aboard the two cargo trains, 2,590 died. The first train, travelling from Iași to Călărași, left on Monday, June 30, and after six and a half days on a convoluted route, it reached its destination. The second train, Iași – Podu Iloaiei, covered a distance of 20 kilometres in eight hours. There were no stops on this route, but the train moved so slowly that the escort often walked along the moving train.

In October 2010, a team of historians, archaeologists and communicators ... discovered a mass grave in the Vulturi Forest, in the village of Popricani, Iasi county. A total of 36 civilian victims were found and extracted: 12 children, nine women, 15 men aged between one and 80....In June 2019, another team found a second mass grave in an area close to the place where the first had been found. The investigation showed that it appeared to contain 22 civilian victims – six children, 12 women and four men.”

The museum is small, part of a larger, modern building. It includes trinkets belonging to Jewish women and children, photographs of well-heeled Romanian women and men stepping over the bodies of dead Jews in the streets, and testimony from three older men of their memories of how their families and friends were executed or died before their eyes in stifling train cars. It was hard to keep my composure, but my guide was young, perhaps in her 30s, and I did not want to be her problem. She asked if I was alright. I felt like asking her the same. She told me stories of people who had visited who expressed ( I do not want to quote her) their hatred of the Jews. Why were they there? To gloat? Romania made Holocaust education mandatory in 2021. In 2021. Of course, the phrase, “better late than never” – a line from Chaucer’s “The Canterbury Tales” – comes to mind but not without a bitter taste in the mouth. It’s so late. It’s very late. Most of the survivors are gone; most of the collective guilt has faded. Having to remind people about the Holocaust, having (horribly) to “convince” anyone that it happened, having to point to the atrocities and then having to defend Israel’s right to defend herself – what have we come to? Where can we possibly go?

I wonder, sometimes, if other Fulbrighters tire of me talking about this. I have no reason to think so, but I should probably just be honest and say: I really don’t care. At moments, not being young is liberating. So many young people care so much about “the world.” What do I have to do to be part of what they care about? What has to happen to me and mine?

It's strange, isn’t it, that I did not visit this site until two weeks before my departure? This will make some readers uncomfortable (though it should not sit any more poorly than my entertaining numerous spirit-dogs) but I believe that in some way I was guided away from visiting this museum early in my stay here in Iasi. When I left the museum, as I walked up Boulevardul Carol I toward my temporary home, I found it difficult to look people in the eye. Perhaps you, whoever you are, are not so sensitive. Perhaps you, whoever you are, can say that no one who walked over those dead Jews’ bodies is alive today, or that they were caught up in the mass hysteria, or did not know what they were doing or seeing. I cannot say those things, and so, I am glad that I grew to know and love Iasi without these pictures and videos in my head. It is not that I “can” hold two conflicting thoughts, simultaneously. It’s that I have no other choice.