Excerpt from ‘Midnight in Exile’ by Andra Nicolescu

When eighty-year-old immigrant Paul Popa chances on a photograph that brings painful memories to the fore, he embarks on a journey of self-discovery that takes him from Washington, D.C., to his days as a young family man and Communist Party bureaucrat in Cold War Romania—drawing the specters of old dreams, fraught choices, and unknown betrayals out of the shadows.

*

“This place is a graveyard,” Paul mutters as he surveys the matches scattered at his feet. Some of them have landed inside a briefcase hosting a gathering of paper dolls. A dressing room of sorts, strewn with gowns, undergarments, suits he absentmindedly recognizes as belonging to a world five—or is it seven?—decades past.

“No problem, sir!” A name-tagged employee of Miss Pixie’s Antique Furnishings and Whatnot materializes before Paul. Like she’s been standing at attention, ready to clean up an old man’s mess.

“Crowded today, isn’t it?” The young woman bends with the unconscious conceit of a young body; her limbs don’t tote the legacies of so many decades. Despite February, she wears jean shorts over sheer black stockings. And then there’s something medieval in the burgundy lace looseness of her blouse, a hint of graceful Cossack in her wide, buckle-strapped, winklepicker-toed boots. Paul resists the urge to ask if she isn’t cold, or if anyone has ever really paid five dollars apiece for a vintage matchbox.

“Thank you,” Paul says, watching the young woman’s efficient work. “My children used to play with those,” he adds, pointing a fedora-wielding hand towards the paper dolls.

“And me,” she straightens, revealing herself as Hayden—Your Pixie Helper. A performative but not insincere smile alights her lips, revealing a collinear, exasperatingly white set of teeth. America, through and through, before Paul’s eyes.

“Can I help you find anything special?” Hayden looks vaguely hopeful, as though Paul’s customer profile holds some key to dissipating her laboring Sunday morning boredom, to unlocking some unlikely story, one to match the dummy novelties on display.

“Thank you, I’m here only to find granddaughter, she is Maya. We wait,” he explains, “for French restaurant.”

“How nice,” Hayden says, apparently relieved to know that this man with the heavy accent, the hint of bygone formality, politeness in his manner, isn’t unchaperoned. “You all live around here?”

“Bethesda. Moved year past, with daughter —” But Hayden is already taking her leave.“Excuse me,” she echoes before vanishing behind some display racks laden with kitsch.

*

When his granddaughter Maya and her friends announced they’d scavenge the shop while waiting for a table at Le Diplomat, Paul said he’d wait outside. Pace the length of 14th Street between P and Q, ponder that perennial American penchant for naming streets with letters and numbers. As though it hadn’t enough history, or dead, to go around. But then the blustering wind sent him inside, where Miss Pixie (locally revered sprite of clearly lugubrious spirit) greeted him with a haphazardly curated clutter of surprises.

Piles of hackneyed sheet music, rotary telephones, defunct timepieces gave way to bowls of pastel-colored imitation pearls. A set of mauve embossed crystal glasses, eerie carbon copies of the mid-century types that Leon and the other Party bosses used to keep in their Ministry offices. The very implements of their lives, mutant innovations, their locution transformed by their passage from one shore of progress to the other. Just like himself: something once unspoiled, aged antique.

Paul’s eyes lingered on an ancient sewing machine, one just like his wife Ana had once owned.

Had Ana’s death not capped their years of marriage at a plentiful but fleeting fifty-three, she would have been right there with him, languishing in that same uselessly urgent sense of dislocation and apocryphal nostalgia. Laughing about how their granddaughter had cajoled them into lining-up to eat for no good reason at all. Lamenting that breakfast mustn’t against all logic be had in a restaurant—excepting of course some dusty hotel cafeteria on the Black Sea, in a resort town unfailingly named Olympus or Neptune or Saturn how many decades ago now?

• 0